Quotes of the Day:
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
"The golden way is to be friends with the world and to regard the whole human family as one."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome."
- Booker T. Washington
Crowdsourcing PSYOP for Putin's War:
"Ukraine did not start this war, neither did nationalists or Nazis. This is not the Russian people's war."
Schwarzenegger tells Russian people their leaders are lying to them
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. No Russian Shelling on Ukraine Observed in Last 24 Hours, DOD Official Says
3. Street warfare: How organized riots are the future of conflict
4. Foreign Fighters from Asia in Ukraine? Prospects and Possibilities
5. Ukrainians have found mystery warheads that look like darts. They're Russia's new weapon.
6. Putin’s Failure Is Biden’s Opportunity
7. Russian strikes hit outskirts of Ukrainian capital and Lviv
8. Putin likens opponents to 'gnats,' signaling new repression
9. Marine Corps unveils ‘influence officers’ for information fight
10. What the Reported Deaths of 4 Russian Generals Mean About the Fighting in Ukraine
11. Contrary to Russian media reports, 3 Tennessee Guardsmen were not killed in Ukraine
12. Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine
13. Analysis | What a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might look like
14. These are the contenders for rebranding Army posts with Confederate namesakes
15. The False Promise of Arming Insurgents
16. Opinion | Watching Russia’s military failures is exhilarating. But a cornered Putin is dangerous.
17. Biden's EIKO Sanctions Concession Is a Gift to the Ayatollahs
18. FDD | Team Biden Runs the Syria Playbook on Ukraine
19. Ukraine War Update - March 18, 2022 | SOF News
20. The war in Ukraine will determine how China sees the world
21. Arnold Schwarzenegger urges Russians to overcome government disinformation
22. 'Can One Man Save the World' song about Zelensky takes internet by storm
23. Yes, Ukraine Could Beat Russia
24. A future defense triad: A new deterrence strategy for the 21st century
25. 'Fed-up' Biden wants Xi Jinping to disavow Russia's Ukraine invasion
26. Six cruise missiles fired at Lviv from submarine in Black Sea - West air command'
27. The Mystique of the Female Soldier: Portrayals of Ukrainian Women in Western Media
28. Review | Deception has changed in the digital era, and spies are adapting
29. Fueling Insurgency: Liquified Natural Gas, ISIS, and Green Berets in Mozambique
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 17 (Putin's war)
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 17, 5:30pm ET
Russian forces did not make any major advances and Ukrainian forces carried out several local counterattacks on March 17.[1] Russian forces made little territorial progress and continued to deploy reserve elements—including from the 1st Guards Tank Army and 810th Naval Infantry Brigade—in small force packets that are unlikely to prove decisive. Russian forces continue to suffer heavy casualties around Kharkiv, and Russian attempts to bypass the city of Izyum are unlikely to succeed. Russian forces continued assaults on Mariupol on March 17 but did not conduct any other successful advances from Crimea.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces continue to make steady territorial gains around Mariupol and are increasingly targeting residential areas of the city.
- Ukrainian forces northwest of Kyiv launched several local counterattacks and inflicted heavy damage on Russian forces.
- Ukrainian forces repelled Russian operations around Kharkiv and reported killing a regimental commander.
- Ukrainian intelligence reports that Russia may have expended nearly its entire store of precision cruise missiles in the first twenty days of its invasion.
- Russian forces deployed unspecified reserve elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army and Baltic Fleet Naval Infantry to northeastern Ukraine on March 17.
- Russia may be parceling out elements of the reserve force that could conduct an amphibious operation along the Black Sea coast to support ongoing assaults on Mariupol, further reducing the likelihood of a Russian amphibious assault on Odesa.
- Ukrainian forces shot down 10 Russian aircraft—including five jets, three helicopters, and two UAVs—on March 16, and Ukrainian forces continue to successfully contest Russian air operations.
Russian forces face mounting difficulties replacing combat casualties and replacing expended munitions. The Ukrainian General Staff stated on March 17 that Russian forces will begin another wave of mobilization for the Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) 1st Army Corps on March 20.[2] Ukrainian intelligence continued to report Russian forces face difficulties manning both combat and support units and increasing desertion rates.[3] The General Staff further reported that Russian forces are increasingly using indiscriminate weapons against residential areas because they used almost their entire supply of “Kalibr” and “Iskander” cruise missiles in the first 20 days of the invasion.[4] It is unclear if the Ukrainian General Staff means Russian forces have used almost all precision munitions earmarked for the operation in Ukraine or almost all missiles in Russia’s total arsenal—though likely the former.
The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported several details on Russian efforts to recruit Syrian mercenaries on March 17.[5] The GUR reported that the Russian military ordered its base in Hmeimim, Syria to send up to 300 fighters from Syria to Ukraine daily. The GUR additionally reported that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has promised to recruit 40,000 Syrian fighters to deploy to Ukraine. The GUR reported Russian authorities are promising Syrian recruits that they will exclusively act as police in occupied territories. Finally, the GUR reported low morale among Syrian recruits, including several cases of self-mutilation to avoid being deployed, and claimed many fighters see deploying to Russia and Belarus as an opportunity to desert and migrate to the EU.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk Oblast;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to regain unspecified territory northwest of Kyiv on March 17 that it claimed Russian forces previously lost to Ukrainian counterattacks.[6] ISW cannot confirm the exact location of these claimed Ukrainian counterattacks. The Ukrainian General Staff additionally stated that Russian forces focused their main efforts on reconnaissance and organizing counter-battery fire on March 17—the first Ukrainian mention of counter-battery fire as an explicit Russian priority.[7] Ukrainian forces inflicted heavy casualties on Russian forces northwest of Kyiv on March 17, forcing the 36th Combined Arms Army (CAA) to “mobilize reserves prematurely” and conducted an artillery strike on a command post of the 35th CAA roughly 35 kilometers from the Ukrainian-Belarusian border.[8]
Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations toward northeastern Kyiv on March 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued preparations to resume offensive operations toward Kyiv and conducted “chaotic shelling” of Ukrainian positions.[9] Social media users filmed Russian armored vehicles in Okhtyrka city on March 16, approximately 65km south of Sumy, though there is no evidence Russian forces have fully captured the city as of publication.[10] Russian forces continue to face difficulties in muddy conditions. Social media users observed four Russian T-80U tanks of the 4th Tank Division stuck in mud in an unknown location in Sumy Oblast, Ukraine, on March 17.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian forces deployed unspecified elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army and Baltic Fleet Naval Infantry to northeastern Ukraine on March 17.[12]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
The Ukrainian General Staff reported at 6:00 pm local time on March 17 that Ukrainian forces inflicted heavy losses on the Russian 252nd Motor Rifle Regiment (of the 3rd Motor Rifle Division) in fighting near Kharkiv and Izyum, destroying 30 percent of the regiment's personnel and equipment.[13] The General Staff additionally reported that Ukrainian forces killed Colonel Igor Nikolaev, commander of the 252nd Motor Rifle Regiment, on March 15.[14] Ukrainian forces released footage of several captured and destroyed vehicles of the Russian 47th Tank Division around Kharkiv on March 17.[15] Russian forces continued to shell Kharkiv on March 17 but did not launch any major assaults.[16] Ukrainian Territorial Defense forces released a video of a raid behind Russian lines near Kharkiv on March 16.[17]
Russian forces launched several unsuccessful attacks south of the city of Izyum on March 16-17.[18] Russian forces likely seek to bypass Izyum to continue advancing toward Slovyansk after failing to take the city through frontal assaults.
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk Oblast:
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces captured the western and northwestern outskirts of Rubuzhne (just northwest of Severodonetsk) and were assaulting the southern portion of the city as of noon local time on March 17.[19] Russian forces additionally launched unsuccessful assaults supported by rotary-wing aviation toward Popasna (south of Severodonetsk) on March 17 and suffered heavy casualties.[20]
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast:
Russian forces continued assaults on Mariupol from the east and west on March 17, and the Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian forces are carrying out the “total destruction of civilian infrastructure, housing and livelihoods.”[21] The Russian Ministry of Defense falsely accused Ukrainian forces of bombing the Mariupol Drama Theater on March 16.[22] A Russian airstrike destroyed the building, which was sheltering hundreds of civilians at the time, on March 16.[23]
Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian assault near Volnovakha, north of Mariupol, as of noon local time on March 17.[24] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) forces advanced 4km on March 17 and captured Maryinka, Slavnoye, and Sladkoye in Donetsk Oblast.[25]
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and west:
Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations toward Mykolayiv in the past 24 hours and continued to reinforce existing positions around the city.[26] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces secured minor successes in attacks toward Kryvyi Rih on March 17, capturing Mala Shisternyia (which Russian forces claimed to have already controlled on March 15 as part of their false claim to have captured all of Kherson Oblast).[27] Russian forces did not conduct any offensive operations directly north toward Zaporizhya on March 17.[28] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on March 16 that Russian forces are relocating equipment (likely helicopters) that survived the Ukrainian airstrike on Kherson Airfield on March 16.[29]
Russian forces remain unlikely to launch an unsupported amphibious assault on Odesa. A spokesperson of the Odesa Regional Administration stated on March 17 that the presence of Russian warships off the coast of Odesa is “psychological pressure and nothing more.”[30] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at midnight local time on March 16 that Russian Black Sea Fleet vessels continue to block shipping in the northwest Black Sea but are not preparing for offensive actions.[31] Elements of Russia’s 810th Naval Infantry Brigade—which Russia has previously held in reserve, possibly to conduct an amphibious landing—deployed to Mariupol on March 16.[32] Russia may be parceling out elements of this reserve force to support ongoing assaults on Mariupol, further reducing the likelihood of a Russian amphibious assault on Odesa.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks;
- The Ukrainian General Staff continued to report that there is a high probability of Russian provocations aimed at involving Belarus in the war in Ukraine, though ISW continues to assess that Belarus is unlikely to open a new line of advance into Ukraine;
- Ukrainian counterattacks and operations by Territorial Defense Forces in northeastern Ukraine threaten Russia’s exposed line of communicating, requiring Russia to redeploy forces away from the offensive toward eastern Kyiv;
- Company and battalion-level attacks northwest of Kyiv likely represent the largest scale of offensive operations Russian forces can currently undertake to complete the encirclement of the city;
- Russian troops may drive on Zaporizhya City itself within the next 48-72 hours, likely attempting to block it on both banks of the Dnipro River and set conditions for subsequent operations after Russian forces take Mariupol, which they are currently besieging.
2. No Russian Shelling on Ukraine Observed in Last 24 Hours, DOD Official Says
It would be great if the Russians reached culmination but I am not going to get my hopes up.
Culmination: Culmination has both offensive and defensive application.
In the offense, the culminating point is the point in time
and space at which an attacker's combat power no longer
exceeds that of the defender. Here the attacker greatly
risks counterattack and defeat and continues the attack
only at great peril. Success in the attack at all
levels is to secure the objective before reaching
culmination. A defender reaches culmination when the
defending force no longer has the capability to go on the
counter-offensive or defend successfully. Success in the
defense is to draw the attacker to culmination, then strike
when the attacker has exhausted available resources and is
ill-disposed to defend successfully.
No Russian Shelling on Ukraine Observed in Last 24 Hours, DOD Official Says
There has been little activity in the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the last 24 hours, according to a senior Defense Department official.
"We have observed [continued Russian] naval activity in the north Black Sea off the coast of Odesa, but no shelling over the course of the last 24 hours that we observed," the official said. "And [we haven't seen] imminent signs of an amphibious assault on Odesa," he noted, adding that in terms of ground movements, the Russians are basically where they have been since yesterday.
Falcon Flight
An Air Force F-16C Fighting Falcon pilot practices basic flight maneuvers upon arrival in Croatia to support NATO’s collective defense in southeast Europe, March 16, 2022.
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Photo By: Air Force Staff Sgt. Miquel Jordan
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"[The] Ukrainians are putting a lot of effort into defending Kyiv as you would expect them to do. [The] Ukrainians are the reason why [the Russians] haven't been able to move forward. And it's because they're very actively resisting any movement by the Russians," he said.
Officially, the war is not at a stalemate; rather, the Ukrainians are actively resisting any movement by the Russians, even though the Russians have advantages in terms of their long-range missile fires, and they are continuing to use them.
Markmanship Training
Ukrainian soldiers conduct marksmanship training and small unit tactics during Rapid Trident 2019, Sept. 21, 2019, near Yavoriv, Ukraine. RT19 is an annual, multinational exercise, which involves about 3,700 personnel from 14 nations, which supports joint combined interoperability among the partner militaries of Ukraine and the United States, and Partnership for Peace nations and NATO allies.
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"We have anecdotal indications that Russian morale is flagging," he said. "We don't have insight into every unit and every location, but we certainly have picked up anecdotal indications that morale is not high in some units. And some of that is, we believe, a function of poor leadership, lack of information that the troops are getting about their mission and objectives, and I think, disillusionment from being resisted as fiercely as they have been. But again, I want to stress, these are anecdotal accounts. We're confident in what we're picking up, and we would not apply that to the entire force that Russia has put into Ukraine," he added.
The United States is continuing to work with its allies and partners on the possibility of helping Ukraine with long-range air defense systems and other systems the Ukrainians are trained on, in addition to helping them face artillery bombardment, the official said. "It's us talking to individual nations who might be able to have these capabilities and to provide them," he added.
Sea Breeze
Sea Breeze is a U.S. and Ukraine co-hosted multinational maritime exercise conducted in the Black Sea and is designed to enhance interoperability of participating nations and strengthen maritime security and peace within the region, Dec. 5, 2017.
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"I don't have an inventory list of the Russian missile stockpile, [but] we still assess that they have a significant amount of their combat power available to them," the official said.
"We have seen them rely a little bit more on dumb bombs, if you will, non-precision guidance. We think it's possible that they might be either conserving their precision-guided munitions or are beginning to experience shortages. Again, it's not 100% clear," he noted.
Live Fire Exercise
Soldiers assigned to the 41st Field Artillery Brigade load M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems for a live fire exercise at the 7th Army Training Command's Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, March 11, 2022. The deployment of forces here is a prudent measure that underpins NATO's collective war-prevention aims, defensive orientation and commitment to protect all allies.
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The official said DOD "absolutely thinks" that while the Russians still have the majority of their combat power available, they're talking about resupply and resourcing and revealed that they are beginning to get concerned about longevity.
"I want to stress — if we haven't seen them move supplies from elsewhere in Russia to Ukraine — [and] they still have a lot available for them — they are thinking about it here three weeks in, certainly is noteworthy," he said.
3. Street warfare: How organized riots are the future of conflict
A very interesting thesis.
This series of events shows how street warfare – organized riots with concrete political objectives – are as geopolitically impactful as open military conflict. The effectiveness of street warfare like Euromaidan can be seen in its increasing proliferation. The year 2018 was marked by the beginning of the Gazan border riots, and 2020 and 2021 saw US Antifa riots and the January 6 Capitol riots.
Warfare is constantly evolving and the doctrines of street warfare are no different. As it develops, it is useful to identify the strategies and tactics to understand how it is conducted against authoritarian regimes and for democracies to prepare for its use by malicious radicals.
Excerpts:
Hamas, Antifa and right-wing extremists have all used organized riots in recent years.
In 2019, Gazan activists began to engage in mass marches on Israel’s border. While the protests were initially grassroots activism, Hamas soon saw their potential and took them over.
In 2020, the Antifa movement began to undertake a new level of action in streets across the US, which eventually allowed some to seize territory, such as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). These were larger territorial occupations than in Euromaidan.
“They very strategically hitched themselves onto the Black Lives Matter protest and had a very big role in helping to turn many of those protests into riots,” Ngo explained.
On January 6, 2021, a mob of rioters at the Capitol tried to interfere with the election’s outcome. While the riot was not as well directed as other examples, it shows how the far-right may be adopting street warfare tactics to further political goals.
Conclusion:
Carl von Clausewitz asserted that war is a continuation of politics by other means. In the same way, organized riots are a continuation of war by other means. There is a political agenda to be achieved and unless one recognizes the seriousness of such acts, one may find that they’ve lost the battle before they’ve even realized it has begun.
Street warfare: How organized riots are the future of conflict
The Euromaidan riots lead to the current Russia-Ukraine war. This shows street warfare – organized riots with concrete political objectives – is as geopolitically impactful as open military conflict
Updated: MARCH 16, 2022 13:39
The war in Ukraine didn’t start on February 24, it started with the Euromaidan riots, on November 21, 2013.
Ukraine’s leadership nixed an agreement with the European Union that would have brought the two closer, in favor of Russian ties. The response was a militarized riot that brought about a pro-Western political revolution and led to counter action in the east in the form of pro-Russian separatism in Donbas and the invasion of Crimea by Russia. The underlying tensions simmered ever since, erupting this year in Russia’s military action against Ukraine.
This series of events shows how street warfare – organized riots with concrete political objectives – are as geopolitically impactful as open military conflict. The effectiveness of street warfare like Euromaidan can be seen in its increasing proliferation. The year 2018 was marked by the beginning of the Gazan border riots, and 2020 and 2021 saw US Antifa riots and the January 6 Capitol riots.
Warfare is constantly evolving and the doctrines of street warfare are no different. As it develops, it is useful to identify the strategies and tactics to understand how it is conducted against authoritarian regimes and for democracies to prepare for its use by malicious radicals.
EUROMAIDAN RIOTS that led to today’s war: At Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square in Kyiv, Dec. 8, 2013. (credit: GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS)
What is street warfare?
While there is confusion and dispute about the terms, typically, protest is used to describe a peaceful organized political or social awareness demonstration by citizens.
In contrast, riots are mass uncontrolled violent outbursts. They may start over anything from sports to politics; however, they aren’t directed toward achieving a specific political objective. Street warfare, or organized riots, are low-intensity conflicts in which planning, strategy and tactics utilize mass street violence to achieve political goals.
“What make Antifa riots different from and more significant than football riots is that the violence is organized under extremist political ideology and has a political agenda, where rioting is actually used as one of the means to try to achieve goals,” Andy Ngo, a journalist who documents far left-wing violence and radicalism, told The Jerusalem Post Magazine.
What movements use organized riots?
Hamas, Antifa and right-wing extremists have all used organized riots in recent years.
In 2019, Gazan activists began to engage in mass marches on Israel’s border. While the protests were initially grassroots activism, Hamas soon saw their potential and took them over.
In 2020, the Antifa movement began to undertake a new level of action in streets across the US, which eventually allowed some to seize territory, such as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). These were larger territorial occupations than in Euromaidan.
“They very strategically hitched themselves onto the Black Lives Matter protest and had a very big role in helping to turn many of those protests into riots,” Ngo explained.
On January 6, 2021, a mob of rioters at the Capitol tried to interfere with the election’s outcome. While the riot was not as well directed as other examples, it shows how the far-right may be adopting street warfare tactics to further political goals.
ANTIFACIST ACTION graffiti in Jerusalem – symbolized by the AFA, flag indicating Communism, and black and red colors – expressing anarcho-Communist sentiments. (credit: MICHAEL STARR)
Why use organized riots?
Street warfare, like other political violence, is used to force and pressure authorities into accepting policies and demands.
As well, it can be used in a more complicated strategy, seeking what Dr. Liram Koblentz-Stenzler, head of the global far-right extremism desk at ICT, calls the acceleration event.
Some radicals want to accelerate the collapse of the current social order and allow the rise of a new social order, which will serve the interests of their movement. To achieve either, the authorities must be discredited.
In “Why Break Windows” by an Antifa supporting revolutionary collective called Crimethinc, they explain that property damage “can mobilize potential comrades by demonstrating that the ruling forces are not invincible.”
The Gaza border riots were in part Hamas’ way of discrediting Israel.
Palestinian protestors use slingshots a demonstration on the beach near the maritime border with Israel, in the northern Gaza Strip, on October 8, 2018. - The border protests since March 30 have been labelled the ''Great March of Return'' because they call for Palestinian refugees to return to their (credit: Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)
“Even if one person gets across [the security barrier], it could send a message that ‘actually this barrier means nothing to us,’” said Ido Levy, associate fellow at the Washington Institute For Near East Policy.
An important factor of discrediting and demoralizing authorities is to manipulate the media and use propaganda.
“Long before an action, when you are establishing and prioritizing goals, work out exactly how much media coverage you want, from which sources, and how you are going to obtain or avoid it,” reads Crimethinc’s direct action guide.
Levy argues that the deceptive appearance of Hamas riots wins over the media. “The demonstrations make it seem like they’re just unarmed civilians.”
It’s this false image that makes it effective for these movements to use organized riots rather than terrorism.
In Ngo’s book Antifa Unmasked, he relates what writer Erin Smith describes as calibrated violence, in which authorities are forced into a dilemma of action by organized riots: If they don’t respond they look weak; if they react they seem to observers as overreacting. Both options discredit authorities.
“Hamas and others understand that when there are women and old people as part of those events, the IDF will not take action,” said Brig.-Gen. (res.) Nitzan Nuriel, fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism and former director of the Israeli Counter-Terrorism Bureau. “We have to admit that we don’t have a good solution, not only Israel, all over the globe, when 10,000 people decided to walk together and demonstrate. If they want to destroy something, they will destroy it.
Planning, logistics and communications for street warfare
What separates a riot from a militarized riot is the high degree of preparation.
Crimethinc’s article “A Step-by-Step Guide to Direct Action” emphasizes the importance of planning: “Proper planning is the essence of safe, effective direct action.” The article advises how to establish objectives, picking “the most effective tactics in the context of the current social and political situation.” Activists are advised to run through multiple scenarios and develop operation timelines, just as with any military operation.
Movements conduct field intelligence to understand potential operational challenges.
“Before the action, study the area carefully,” advises Crimethinc. “Chart safe routes in and out; look for hiding places, obstacles, potential targets, and surveillance cameras.”
These movements even conduct field intelligence against other riot organizers.
During the George Floyd protests, “white supremacists also followed the protests, in many cases to try to organize or to push counter protests,” said Dr. Ariel Koch, a specialist on transnational violent extremist ideologies and movements, and a postdoctoral researcher at Reichman University.
“You can see in anarchist chatter how they mobilize supporters to confront Patriot Front [a white supremacist group] members by following Patriot Front, reporting the streets where they are going and where they are moving, and calling others to block them or to arrange a counter protest,” Koch also said.
To coordinate, movements have developed communication procedures during planning and in the field.
Crimethinc advises to “use communication systems such as burner phones, encrypted text messaging, two-way radios or whistles to keep in touch; audio or visual signals such as car horns or fireworks can also serve.”
Koblent-Stenzler explained how some right-wing extremists have adopted coded language, “We saw that they created a video game jargon. They are using terms that are taken from video games such as Minecraft, Call of Duty, or Roblox, to represent actions... For example, if a person says that he wants to collect as many diamonds as possible, he isn’t talking about diamonds in the video game, but about people he wants to kill.”
This operational security goes beyond coded language. Many movements practice what is known as black bloc.
“You wear all black, cover your face, hide your identity. You have no identity. You are part of something bigger,” Koch explains. This creates anonymity, solidarity and hinders legal action.
White supremacists are advised “to wear long sleeves because you don’t want other people to identify you if they see a tattoo,” said Koblent-Stenzler.
“Cover your whole face, not just your mouth,” advises Crimethinc. “There should be no visible logos on your clothes, shoes or backpack.”
The most difficult aspect of logistics can be transport and supply lines – as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has reminded the world.
Hamas organized buses to riot sites, ensuring people would arrive and according to Nuriel, supplied rioters with water and Wifi.
During Antifa riots, “There are people who are setting up tables, tents and canopies where you can get food, you can get water, you can get tent supplies. What these things did was create a parallel economy where people were able to supply those who are rioting full time.”
Antifa-affiliated affinity groups are small teams that specialize and can focus on support efforts, such as medical support, food or transport, in the same way that a military force has logistics divisions. In Portland, Riot Ribs fed rioters so that they could continue rioting. An army marches on its stomach, so does a riot army.
Organized riot tactics
Movements that use organized riots consciously employ advanced tactics to achieve their immediate objectives.
This tactical knowledge starts with manuals and sharing best practice.
“We see videos, and the same videos are shared again and again by different players, by different actors,” said Koch. “How to defend yourself from tear gas, from riot police, what formation you need to stand in.”
White supremacists are “using cyberspace in order to share information,” said Koblent-Stenzler. “We can see them recommending reading insurgency books.”
In CHAZ, activists had a table with manuals that “included descriptions, for example, how to overtake a building, how to secure the exits so that police can’t get in, how to use human shields effectively, how to create Molotov cocktails and other firebombs,” said Ngo.
Riot formation graphic shared before a ''Dyke March'' in 2020. (credit: Screenshot/Instagram)
Crimethinc has dozens of tactical and strategic articles and resources on its website to share best practice for direct action. In one such text, it advises participants to conduct debriefings “to discuss what went well and what lessons can be learned,” just as militaries do.
One of Antifa’s lessons is a form of combined arms: “Diversity of tactics is key – not just tolerance for different approaches, but thinking about how to combine all of them into a symbiotic whole,” writes Crimethinc. They also practice specializations, not just of dedicated units like medical teams, but individual roles and weapons that contribute to an overall plan, like scouts or drivers.
Specialization and combined arms can allow for advanced stratagems in the field, such as maneuvers using smokescreens.
In Gaza, “what you would see is they would make a smoke screen with burnt tires and then they would go behind the smoke screens, just start throwing whatever objects they had at IDF soldiers to make it harder to see who’s actually throwing and who’s a civilian,” said Levy.
“At the same time [smokescreens] create more options for launching terrorist cell attack against the soldiers and against villages,” Nuriel noted.
Communication and planning allows rioters to strike multiple locations at the same time, allowing them to divide and conquer.
“Sometimes they will split off into different groups for a particular direct action,” Ngo explained. “One large gathering will do some active mass rioting, such as trying to break inside a police station, whereas a smaller group will go out and carry out another type of violent, destructive activity. Police numbers are too few to be able to respond to both.”
Nuriel said the Gaza riots would often be planned at up to five locations on the border at the same time.
Another strategy that has been implemented in street war are human shields.
Ngo explained how Antifa operatives would embed within peaceful protests, “and engage in violent conduct, such as throwing projectiles at police or breaking out windows. And when police are forced to respond,” the protesters rather than Antifa may be harmed, which also feeds into propaganda efforts.
Members of the right-wing group Patriot Front wait along the George Washington Parkway near Arlington Cemetery after marching on the National Mall on December 04, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia. Patriot Front broke off of the white nationalist group Vanguard America after the deadly “Unite the Right” (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Likewise, Hamas “put armed operatives within crowds of civilians,” said Levy. “Most of the people there seem to really be unarmed civilians that were kind of sent there by Hamas” and are used as shields.
Antifa have also mastered a more ancient form of shield combat, shield walls, to counter police riot measures.
“One of them individually having a shield and standing out, they’re actually quite vulnerable,” explained Ngo. “In practice, they link shields together in formation so that there’s a whole line of shields protecting them and those behind them. The shields also obscure fellow combatants who are preparing projectiles and weapons.”
Antifa and right-wing extremists have reportedly been seen practicing shield formations, showing how training is as important as with a military.
Riot weapons
Rioters have figured out which weapons fit their strategy of calibrated violence and allows them to best utilize their tactics.
Shields aren’t just defensive. “You can strike with it, you can defend yourself with it and you can paint it with your symbol and use it as propaganda,” said Koch. “Doesn’t matter if you’re an anarchist that paints the triple arrows or a Neo-Nazi that paints the Celtic cross.”
Umbrellas, as seen in the Hong Kong protests, can also be used as defensive tools against police munitions or as weapons.
Antifa “would fasten blades to the end of umbrellas,” said Ngo.
Incendiary weapons like Molotov cocktails have long been associated with riots.
It’s one of the “cheapest forms of devastating attacks,” said Koch. “You can set some buildings on fire with gasoline and cause real damage, not only to people but to property.”
During the Gaza riots, there was “increased use of incendiary kites and balloons,” said Levy. These could be launched from within crowds by Hamas’ incendiary kite and balloon unit. Many acres of land have been scorched by these weapons.
Koch notes that neo-Nazi arson is different than other extremist arson, in that “we are talking about people who seek to kill the people who are inside the building.”
Fireworks are also used for similar reasons as Molotov cocktails. They can be used to blind, cause distractions, disorient and cause harm.
“They’ll tape together multiple fireworks, for example, and aim these at a particular target to try to burn them or to throw it into a crowd,” said Ngo.
Lasers have also become a notable tactical weapon, “to disorient police and federal agents. They can also disable security cameras,” writes Crimethinc.
Other weapons commonly used include pepper spray, bear mace, frozen water bottles and paint bombs. While firearms aren’t always used, radicals are often armed. In Portland, extremists have shot ideological opponents several times now.
While Antifa have also used items such as lacrosse sticks to scoop up teargas canisters to throw back at police, Gazan rioters have mastered a better technique: Using slings to throw gas grenades, in addition to their normal munitions of stones.
Can extremists learn from one another?
Generally, radical Left violence is more widespread but less intense; whereas, radical Right violence is high intensity and low saturation.
“The right-wing extremists are much more militant, more violent and full of hatred,” said Koch.
Yet, extremists of all stripes could learn from each other how to conduct better street war.
Koch explained that Neo-Nazis learned black bloc and direct action from anarchists and have even adopted “leaderless resistance, which was more common among anarchists. They have groups or movements that have no leadership,” and are more like networks.
In the process coined by Koch, “fused extremism... one ideology may adopt and introduce into it different aspects from different ideologies and it creates something new.”
“If one concept works for one form of violent extremism, actors in another violent extremist group or movement might also adopt it,” according to Koch.
Street warfare may continue to evolve, becoming more effective and movements like Neo-Nazism or Hamas could embrace it, as much as the radical Left has.
These strategies and tactics can also be used to resist authoritarian regimes.
A continuation of war by other means
As Russia cracks down on protests and dissent in its own territory, we may see residents conduct street wars to forward their political agenda.
Likewise, if Ukraine were to survive Russian predation, it could see extremists like the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion repeat Euromaidan with the objective of implementing more radical political change in Ukraine.
Carl von Clausewitz asserted that war is a continuation of politics by other means. In the same way, organized riots are a continuation of war by other means. There is a political agenda to be achieved and unless one recognizes the seriousness of such acts, one may find that they’ve lost the battle before they’ve even realized it has begun.
4. Foreign Fighters from Asia in Ukraine? Prospects and Possibilities
Excerpts:
The vast majority of Asians and Southeast Asians who were living, working, or studying in Ukraine have now been evacuated, but it appears that of those who elected to stay, a smaller subset have taken up arms. A Malaysian individual who had been living in Ukraine has reportedly joined the Ukrainian territorial defense army. Separately, rather than evacuating an Indian student from Kharkiv has chosen to remain to fight against Russian forces. The latter individual appears to have had a fascination with the military, while the former’s motivations are less clear but seems tied to wanting to resist the invasion lest Russian actions spread further.
From Asia itself, a small number of individuals are already thought to have made the journey to Ukraine. One prominent South Korean YouTuber, who is also a former naval diver, appears to already have arrived in the country. He is one of approximately 100 South Koreans who expressed an interest in taking up arms, despite the government warning against traveling to Ukraine to fight. There have been expressions of interest from dozens of individuals from Japan, some with experience in the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and a small number claiming experience with the French Foreign Legion.
In what is likely a response to pressure exerted by some governments, the calls for volunteers by some Ukrainian embassies have been amended or deleted. In the case of Japan, it is now a call for individuals with specialized medical, IT, communications, or firefighting experience. A possible reason is that answering foreign military recruitment could run afoul of Japanese law that criminalizes individuals waging war on a foreign country. There has been similar objections in other countries. For instance, the Indian authorities appear to have forced the deletion of a tweet by the International Legion which appeared to target Indian volunteers.
Foreign Fighters from Asia in Ukraine? Prospects and Possibilities
Despite the logistical and financial obstacles, small numbers of Asians have pledged to fight for the Ukrainian cause.
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Ukraine’s appeal for volunteers to join its International Legion of the Defense of Ukraine has excited considerable comment, as well as historical comparisons with other mobilizations. Besides the website which provides details about how to sign up, the call for volunteers has also been prominent on the Facebook pages of Ukrainian embassies worldwide, including in Asia.
Notwithstanding these warnings not to travel, the pattern of mobilization and travel from Western nations is clear. Most credible analyses suggest that hundreds, many of them military veterans, are in the process of making the journey to Ukraine, or have already arrived there.
The mobilization is in some ways reminiscent of the Western volunteers who joined various armed groups in Iraq and Syria, most notably the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel) in the conflict against the Islamic State (IS), a phenomenon that I have written about elsewhere. In the present case, most of the media coverage has been of Western volunteers explaining with some eloquence their reasons for wanting to fight, expressing motivations that, mutatis mutandis, are not altogether different from what drove foreigners to join the conflict against IS.
With the conflict against IS, the transnational element comprised almost exclusively individuals from the West, plus members of the Kurdish diaspora, with a sprinkling of outliers: a few people from South America, Central Europe, and Australia. There were very few individuals from Asia. The situation, certainly at least when it comes to intentions, may be somewhat different this time.
Asians in Ukraine
The vast majority of Asians and Southeast Asians who were living, working, or studying in Ukraine have now been evacuated, but it appears that of those who elected to stay, a smaller subset have taken up arms. A Malaysian individual who had been living in Ukraine has reportedly joined the Ukrainian territorial defense army. Separately, rather than evacuating an Indian student from Kharkiv has chosen to remain to fight against Russian forces. The latter individual appears to have had a fascination with the military, while the former’s motivations are less clear but seems tied to wanting to resist the invasion lest Russian actions spread further.
From Asia itself, a small number of individuals are already thought to have made the journey to Ukraine. One prominent South Korean YouTuber, who is also a former naval diver, appears to already have arrived in the country. He is one of approximately 100 South Koreans who expressed an interest in taking up arms, despite the government warning against traveling to Ukraine to fight. There have been expressions of interest from dozens of individuals from Japan, some with experience in the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and a small number claiming experience with the French Foreign Legion.
In what is likely a response to pressure exerted by some governments, the calls for volunteers by some Ukrainian embassies have been amended or deleted. In the case of Japan, it is now a call for individuals with specialized medical, IT, communications, or firefighting experience. A possible reason is that answering foreign military recruitment could run afoul of Japanese law that criminalizes individuals waging war on a foreign country. There has been similar objections in other countries. For instance, the Indian authorities appear to have forced the deletion of a tweet by the International Legion which appeared to target Indian volunteers.
Southeast Asia
The overall diplomatic and political reaction from Southeast Asian nations to the Russian invasion has been tepid, with one notable exception – Singapore – which has come out strongly against Russia’s invasion. This is also mirrored in the somewhat lukewarm reaction in terms of grassroots sentiment. These are extremely diverse nations, but broad strands of thinking, derived from an analysis of social media postings and online discussions, may have some bearing on individual decisions.
One is the enormous distance separating the region from Ukraine. While individuals from several Southeast Asian nations have expressed sympathy and solidarity, there is the sense of there being no real connection to distant (and largely Christian) Ukraine. Motivation to fight applies more when it comes to supporting co-religionists, with hundreds of Malaysians and Indonesians traveling to Syria and Iraq to join IS in the period 2014-2018.
The second is that people in some countries are preoccupied with what they see as more pressing issues. The looming May presidential election in the Philippines is one. In Myanmar, which faces a situation amounting to civil war, there has been some sympathy for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression (and indeed a small number of rallies in solidarity with its cause). A contributory factor is Russia’s support for the military junta in Myanmar. But for many, the struggle against the regime that has seized power is clearly a more pressing issue.
The third strand concerns sentiment in Muslim-majority nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Discussions in many quarters exhibit an anti-West, and thence anti-Ukraine, stance, since Ukraine is seen as being pro-Western and has a Jewish president, which is anathema to a segment of Southeast Asian Muslim opinion. In Indonesia in particular, there is strong pro-Putin sentiment within some quarters of public and academic discourse, with the sense that the West also has been highly hypocritical (the Palestine issue comes up often in discussions).
Hardline extremist groups, particularly in Indonesia, would have taken note of IS’ recent guidance that it is forbidden to get involved in what is called a “crusader on crusader” war. But as the situation evolves, the possibility that a small number of motivated individuals from Muslim communities in the region might choose to involve themselves in some way cannot be ruled out, particularly if Ukrainian Muslims are seen to be suffering. The recent call of the Mufti of Ukraine for Muslims everywhere to do what they can to help does not seem to have gained much, if any, traction in Southeast Asia, but worldwide, influential Muslim ideologues have left open the possibility that defending Muslims in Ukraine might be an acceptable reason to join the conflict.
Ways and Means
Some Southeast Asian nations have either prohibited their citizens fighting in Ukraine, or have pointed to existing laws that expressly outlaw them from fighting in foreign lands. This may be on account of the fact that some (at the time of writing, a small number of citizens from Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) have expressed an interest in taking up arms for Ukraine.
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When it comes to individuals actually getting to the war zone, the factors at play may have to do less with official positions or general societal sentiment expressed online, and more (as with Western volunteers) with means, will, and motivation.
One country that should be considered here is Thailand. Media reports suggest that a number of individuals, some who are military veterans or have gone through mandatory military conscription, have attempted to register their interest with the Ukrainian embassy in Bangkok. Some of these individuals on social media evince a sense of wanting to help free Ukraine from oppression, and seem willing to die in the cause of supporting democracy. Some of this thinking appears linked to activism on the part of these individuals to protests and activity against the Thai military, which seized power in a 2014 coup. The magnitude of the response, with Thai-language online groups seeing a large number of interested individuals, led to the Russian embassy in Thailand to post a warning that individuals should not join the conflict, and that they would be treated as mercenaries if they did.
Some of these individuals appear to have the will, but not necessarily the means. Some say that financial concerns are holding them back, including the cost of getting to Ukraine. In some cases, motivations are also misplaced. Some interested individuals from Thailand for example appear to have either outsized notions of the pay they would be entitled to, or have wrongly received the impression that they would would receive European Union citizenship in return.
What Next?
In recent years, a large number of Southeast Asian Muslims have taken up arms and joined IS and other jihadist groups. On the basis of what is presently known, Muslims in Southeast Asia are unlikely to feel the draw of the Ukraine conflict, but two possibilities should be considered here. One is that if the war in Ukraine proves protracted and civilian casualties mount, Southeast Asians might attempt to provide direct aid or be part of humanitarian efforts to Ukraine. This would need to be watched by governments and security agencies, as joining humanitarian NGOs delivering aid was an entry point for many, including Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims, who ended up taking part in the Syrian conflict. The experience had a radicalizing effect on some, prompting them later to join IS or other groups.
The other possibility is that individuals unconnected on any religious or ideological level with Ukraine, but who feel a strong enough impulse to defend Ukrainians, might still attempt to make the journey notwithstanding the logistical and financial obstacles. If they did so, they would probably be acting from deep-seated personal motivations. The sense of wanting to help an oppressed people, even if they are very distant, played a major role in the thinking of one of the very few individuals from Southeast Asia – an ethnic Chinese Singaporean – who in 2015 attempted unsuccessfully to join a Kurdish militia in its fight against IS in 2015. He was motivated not by any direct connection but deeply personal considerations and issues in his life, as well as with a desire to help the Kurds.
In the case of Ukraine, neither of these possibilities should be ruled out.
The author is grateful to experts and researchers in Southeast Asia and beyond, too many to name (and several of whom requested anonymity), for their invaluable guidance and advice.
5. Ukrainians have found mystery warheads that look like darts. They're Russia's new weapon.
For missile experts: any assessment?
Ukrainians have found mystery warheads that look like darts. They're Russia's new weapon.
A Russian short-range ballistic missile, believed to be an unexploded Iskander missile, was found near Kramatorsk, Ukraine.
National Guard of Ukraine/Reuters
- The mystery munitions are decoys meant to trick air-defense radars and heat-seeking missiles.
- They are each about a foot long and shaped like a dart with an orange tail, American intelligence officials say.
- One expert called the discovery of these decoys an "intelligence bonanza" for the West.
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Russia has deployed a mystery munition in Ukraine that's stumped ballistic experts.
The munitions are decoys meant to trick air-defense radars and heat-seeking missiles, the New York Times reported, and are released from Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles. They are each about a foot long and shaped like a dart with an orange tail, American intelligence officials say.
The devices produce radio signals to confuse enemy radars attempting to locate the missiles, and they also contain a heat source to attract other missiles.
—CAT-UXO (@CAT_UXO) March 5, 2022
Experts were confused by the munitions, which began circulating on social media a few weeks ago, many mistaking them for bomblets from cluster weapons, reported the Times' John Ismay, a US Navy veteran who was qualified in explosive ordnance disposal. They are similar to Cold War-era decoys known as "penetration aids" that were designed to bypass antimissile systems in order to reach their targets.
The Iskander is a short-range ballistic missile system developed soon after the fall of the Soviet Union and has a range of more than 400km, or roughly 250 miles.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, called the discovery of these munitions an "intelligence bonanza" for the West. He said it is rare to see technical information about adversaries' ballistic countermeasures, as their effectiveness is drastically reduced when their secrecy is compromised.
"Decoys like this can be effective in terms of fooling radars or infrared seekers on kill vehicles, but they need to be kept secret," Lewis told Insider. "Because if your adversary or if the defender has access to the countermeasures, then they can adapt their missile defense systems so that they're not fooled."
To Lewis, it's a puzzle why Russia would use these decoys against Ukraine, which he says does not have the military capabilities to successfully shoot down Iskander missiles.
"It's a very curious decision by the Russians," he said. "In using missiles with these decoys, they're really compromising their own ability to defeat much more sophisticated missile defenses that the United States and other NATO countries might use."
6. Putin’s Failure Is Biden’s Opportunity
This is the key point and we should all help Team Biden to capitalize.
Excerpts:
To capitalize on Mr. Putin’s blunder is the most important job Team Biden has.
Finally, the administration must, for now, make opposition to Mr. Putin the core of its global foreign policy. Russia’s presence in places like Syria, Libya and, increasingly, sub-Saharan Africa will be harder to sustain as economic and military pressure on Moscow grows. Team Biden must look creatively and act boldly to hit Russian interests all over the world. Other goals must, when necessary, be set aside. Greening the world’s energy supply is, for now, less important than weaning Europe from Russian hydrocarbons. Denying Russia revenue from nuclear trade with Iran is, for now, more important than a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.
This won’t be easy. Despite his misstep in Ukraine, Mr. Putin remains a resourceful practitioner of ruthless realpolitik, and he still has some cards to play. Team Biden is for the most part a collection of foxes, who pursue many goals and have a hard time focusing on one objective. To take full advantage of the opportunity Mr. Putin has offered, Mr. Biden must get in touch with his inner hedgehog and focus his foreign policy on one thing and one thing only: making Mr. Putin pay.
Putin’s Failure Is Biden’s Opportunity
Forget about ‘off-ramps’ for Russian aggression against Ukraine. As Clausewitz observed, a key to success is to pursue a retreating enemy.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
March 17, 2022 12:58 pm ET
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a teleconference with members of the government in Moscow, March 10.
Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/Associated Press
Joe Biden, as I wrote earlier this week, has a genuine crisis on his hands. But thanks to Vladimir Putin’s historic blunder in Ukraine, Mr. Biden has something else: a once-in-a-decade opportunity to score a historic victory that reshapes the global playing field to America’s advantage. To capitalize on Mr. Putin’s blunder is the most important job Team Biden has.
This requires a psychological shift. Earlier in the crisis we heard of American and European diplomats offering Mr. Putin “off-ramps.” Some still seek compromise solutions that would allow Mr. Putin to save face. The time for such thinking may come again, but for now the objective should be clear. Mr. Putin must pay—and be seen to pay—such a heavy price for his miscalculation that leaders around the world will think twice before taking on the U.S. and its global alliance system.
Carl von Clausewitz noted long ago that a key to success is to pursue a retreating enemy. When an enemy is in retreat, it is possible to inflict the greatest damage on his forces, disorganized and disheartened.
Mr. Putin’s armies may not yet be retreating in Ukraine, but the failure of his initial campaign—and the atrocious methods to which he must now resort to salvage his military position—have put him on the political and psychological defensive. The U.S. must do everything possible to exploit this unexpected opportunity for a decisive victory against a dangerous opponent.
The past two weeks have changed the world. Mr. Putin’s Russia turns out to be weaker, and Ukraine stronger, than many Westerners thought. And there is more. As Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” Given what we know about who Mr. Putin is and what he does, preventing him from building an empire on the doorstep of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization must now be considered a major Western interest.
Making Mr. Putin pay for his war of aggression is not a distraction from America’s focus on the Indo-Pacific. Xi Jinping has also miscalculated by putting his full prestige behind the Russian alliance just as Mr. Putin stepped into the abyss. Thanks to that misstep, any setbacks Mr. Putin encounters in Ukraine are setbacks for Mr. Xi as well. They reduce his prestige in China and abroad by showing, first, that he is capable of major miscalculations in world politics and, second, that he is unable to prevent the U.S. and its allies from humiliating Beijing’s most important ally.
Nothing matters more right now to the peace of the world and the security of the U.S. than crippling Mr. Putin’s drive to rebuild an aggressive and despotic empire by waging a criminal war. The Biden administration, often after prodding from a hawkish Congress, has taken important steps in this direction, but three more things remain to be done.
First, we must support Ukraine’s ability to fight. The extraordinary early performance of the Ukrainian army, combined with the comprehensive failure of Russian military preparation, turned Mr. Putin’s gambit into a disaster. Keeping the Ukrainian military in the field is now a major strategic interest of the U.S. This is, or soon will be, not only about weapons and intelligence. Ukraine’s economy was never strong; it now faces collapse. In every domain, the burden of proof must shift from those who wish to send aid to those who wish to deny it.
Second, the sanctions on Russia, especially the energy sanctions, need to become more effective. The League of Nations failed its first test when oil was excluded from the sanctions imposed on Italy following its 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. Europe remains addicted to Russian energy, which means NATO is funding Mr. Putin’s war. If NATO is serious, this must stop.
Finally, the administration must, for now, make opposition to Mr. Putin the core of its global foreign policy. Russia’s presence in places like Syria, Libya and, increasingly, sub-Saharan Africa will be harder to sustain as economic and military pressure on Moscow grows. Team Biden must look creatively and act boldly to hit Russian interests all over the world. Other goals must, when necessary, be set aside. Greening the world’s energy supply is, for now, less important than weaning Europe from Russian hydrocarbons. Denying Russia revenue from nuclear trade with Iran is, for now, more important than a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.
This won’t be easy. Despite his misstep in Ukraine, Mr. Putin remains a resourceful practitioner of ruthless realpolitik, and he still has some cards to play. Team Biden is for the most part a collection of foxes, who pursue many goals and have a hard time focusing on one objective. To take full advantage of the opportunity Mr. Putin has offered, Mr. Biden must get in touch with his inner hedgehog and focus his foreign policy on one thing and one thing only: making Mr. Putin pay.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the March 18, 2022, print edition.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
7. Russian strikes hit outskirts of Ukrainian capital and Lviv
So much for reaching culmination. I expect with the strikes against Lviv it is only a matter of time before there is a mistake and a rocket or missile lands in a NATO country. What will NATO do then?
Russian strikes hit outskirts of Ukrainian capital and Lviv
AP · by CARA ANNA · March 18, 2022
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces pressed their assault on Ukrainian cities Friday, with new missile strikes and shelling on the edges of the capital Kyiv and the western city of Lviv, as world leaders pushed for an investigation of the Kremlin’s repeated attacks on civilian targets, including schools, hospitals and residential areas.
The early morning barrage of missiles on the outskirts of Lviv were the closest strike yet to the center of the city, which has become a crossroads for people fleeing from other parts of Ukraine and for others entering to deliver aid or fight.
Black smoke billowed for hours after the explosions, which hit a facility for repairing military aircraft near the city’s international airport, only six kilometers (four miles) from the center. One person was wounded, the regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyy, said.
Multiple blasts hit in quick succession around 6 a.m., shaking nearby buildings, witnesses said. The missiles were launched from the Black Sea, but the Ukrainian air force’s western command said it had shot down two of six missile in the volley. A bus repair facility was also damaged, Lviv’s mayor Andriy Sadovyi said.
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Lviv lies not far from the Polish border and well behind the front lines, but it and the surrounding area have not been spared Russia’s attacks. In the worst, nearly three dozen people were killed last weekend in a strike on a training facility near the city. Lviv’s population has swelled by some 200,000 as people from elsewhere in Ukraine have sought shelter there.
Early morning barrages also hit a residential building on the northern edges of Kyiv, killing at least one person, according to emergency services, who said 98 people were evacuated from the building. Two others were killed when strikes hit residential and administrative buildings in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, and Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection.
In city after city around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked. Rescue workers searched for survivors in the ruins of a theater that served as a shelter when it was blown apart by a Russian airstrike in the besieged southern city of Mariupol Wednesday. And in Merefa, near the northeast city of Kharkiv, at least 21 people were killed when Russian artillery destroyed a school and a community center Thursday, a local official said.
In Kharkiv, a massive fire raged through a local market after shelling Thursday. One firefighter was killed and another injured when new shelling hit as emergency workers fought the blaze, emergency services said. In the northern city of Chernihiv, dozens of bodies were brought to the morgue in just one day.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday that American officials were evaluating potential war crimes and that if the intentional targeting of civilians by Russia is confirmed, there will be “massive consequences.”
The United Nations political chief, Undersecretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo, also called for an investigation into civilian casualties, reminding the U.N. Security Council that international humanitarian law bans direct attacks on civilians.
She said many of the daily attacks battering Ukrainian cities “are reportedly indiscriminate” and involve the use of “explosive weapons with a wide impact area.” DiCarlo said the devastation in Mariupol and Kharkiv ”raises grave fears about the fate of millions of residents of Kyiv and other cities facing intensifying attacks.”
About 35,000 civilians left Mariupol over the previous two days, Kirilenko said Friday.
In Mariupol, hundreds of civilians were said to have taken shelter in a grand, columned theater in the city’s center when it was hit Wednesday by a Russian airstrike. On Friday, their fate was still uncertain, with conflicting reports on whether anyone had emerged from the rubble. Communications are disrupted across the city and movement is difficult because of shelling and fighting.
“We hope and we think that some people who stayed in the shelter under the theater could survive,” Petro Andrushchenko, an official with the mayor’s office, told The Associated Press on Thursday. He said the building had a relatively modern basement bomb shelter designed to withstand airstrikes. Other officials said earlier that some people had gotten out.
Video and photos provided by the Ukrainian military showed the at least three-story building had been reduced to a roofless shell, with some exterior walls collapsed. Satellite imagery on Monday from Maxar Technologies showed huge white letters on the pavement outside the theater spelling out “CHILDREN” in Russian — “DETI” — to alert warplanes to the vulnerable people hiding inside.
Across Mariupol, snow flurries fell around the skeletons of burned, windowless and shrapnel-scarred apartment buildings as smoke rose above the skyline.
“We are trying to survive somehow,” said one Mariupol resident, who gave only her first name, Elena, on the outskirts of the city Thursday. “My child is hungry. I don’t know what to give him to eat.”
She had been trying to call her mother in another town. “I can’t tell her I am alive, you understand. There is no connection, just nothing,” she said.
Cars, some with the “Z” symbol of the Russian invasion force in their windows, drove past stacks of ammunition boxes and artillery shells in a neighborhood controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Russia’s military denied bombing the theater or anyplace else in Mariupol on Wednesday.
In Chernihiv, at least 53 people were brought to morgues over 24 hours, killed amid heavy Russian air attacks and ground fire, the local governor, Viacheslav Chaus, told Ukrainian TV Thursday.
Ukraine’s emergency services said a mother, father and three of their children, including 3-year-old twins, were killed when a Chernihiv hostel was shelled. Civilians were hiding in basements and shelters across the embattled city of 280,000.
“The city has never known such nightmarish, colossal losses and destruction,” Chaus said.
The World Health Organization said it has verified 43 attacks on hospitals and health facilities, with 12 people killed and 34 injured.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said early Friday he was thankful to President Joe Biden for additional military aid, but he would not get into specifics about the new package, saying he did not want Russia to know what to expect. He said when the invasion began on Feb. 24, Russia expected to find Ukraine much as it did in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea without a fight and backed separatists as they took control of the eastern Donbas region.
Instead, he said, Ukraine had much stronger defenses than expected, and Russia “didn’t know what we had for defense or how we prepared to meet the blow.”
In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven leading economies accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of conducting an “unprovoked and shameful war,” and called on Russia to comply with the International Court of Justice’s order to stop its attack and withdraw its forces.
Both Ukraine and Russia this week reported some progress in negotiations. Zelenskyy said he would not reveal Ukraine’s negotiating tactics.
“Working more in silence than on television, radio or on Facebook,” Zelenskyy said. “I consider it the right way.”
While details of Thursday’s talks were unknown, an official in Zelenskyy’s office told the AP that on Wednesday, the main subject discussed was whether Russian troops would remain in separatist regions in eastern Ukraine after the war and where the borders would be.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks, said Ukraine was insisting on the inclusion of one or more Western nuclear powers in the negotiations and on legally binding security guarantees for Ukraine.
In exchange, the official said, Ukraine was ready to discuss a neutral military status.
Russia has demanded that NATO pledge never to admit Ukraine to the alliance or station forces there.
The fighting has led more than 3 million people to flee Ukraine, the U.N. estimates. The death toll remains unknown, though Ukraine has said thousands of civilians have died.
___
Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and other AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.
___
AP · by CARA ANNA · March 18, 2022
8. Putin likens opponents to 'gnats,' signaling new repression
I fear a brutal crackdown is coming. The only question is will it be on a Stalin-like level?
Putin likens opponents to 'gnats,' signaling new repression
NEW YORK (AP) — Facing stiff resistance in Ukraine and crippling economic sanctions at home, Russian President Vladimir Putin is using language that recalls the rhetoric from Josef Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s.
Putin’s ominous speech on Wednesday likened opponents to “gnats” who try to weaken the country at the behest of the West — crude remarks that set the stage for sweeping repressions against those who dare to speak out against the war in Ukraine.
His rant appeared to reflect his frustration about the slow pace of the Russian offensive, which bogged down on the outskirts of Kyiv and around other cities in northeastern Ukraine. Russian forces made comparatively bigger gains in the south, but they haven’t been able to capture the strategic port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, and their advance along the Black Sea coast also has stalled.
Meanwhile, Russia has been battered by devastating Western sanctions that cut the government’s access to an estimated half of the country’s hard currency reserves and dealt crippling blows to many sectors of the economy.
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With his hopes for a blitz in Ukraine shattered and economic costs mounting swiftly, Putin unleashed a venomous diatribe at those who oppose his course.
“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths — spit them out on the pavement,” Putin said during Wednesday’s call with top officials. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
The coarse language carried ominous parallels for those familiar with Soviet history. During show trials of Stalin’s Great Terror, authorities disparaged the declared “enemies of the people” as “reptiles” or “mad dogs.”
His voice strained by anger, Putin charged that Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine were a “fifth column” obsequiously serving Western interests and ready to “sell their own mother.”
“I don’t condemn those who have villas in Miami or the French Riviera, those who can’t live without foie gras, oysters or so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said. “It’s not a problem. The problem is that many of those people are mentally there (in the West) and not here with our people, with Russia. They don’t remember or just don’t understand that they are just ... expendables used for the purpose of inflicting the maximum damage on our people.”
As he spoke, the Russian State Investigative Committee announced the opening of criminal probes against several people accused of spreading “false information” about the military action in Ukraine.
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The first person singled out by the country’s top investigative agency was Veronika Belotserkovskaya, a popular blogger and socialite who has written books about French and Italian cuisine and divides her time between Russia and southern France. She appeared to be a target conveniently fitting Putin’s scathing description of cosmopolitan Russians who love fancy food and are seemingly at odds with the broad masses.
The investigative committee said it would move to issue an international arrest warrant for Belotserkovskaya, alleging her Instagram posts “discredited” state authorities and the military.
Belotserkovskaya responded by writing: “I have been officially declared to be a decent person!”
She is being investigated under new legislation fast-tracked on March 4 by the Kremlin-controlled parliament, a week after Putin launched the invasion. It envisions prison terms of up to 15 years for posting “fake” information about the military that differs from the official narrative.
Putin and his lieutenants describe the war in Ukraine as a “special military operation” intended to uproot alleged “neo-Nazi nationalists” and remove a potential military threat against Russia— goals that most of the world has rejected as bogus.
Russian officials have attributed the offensive’s slow pace to their desire to spare civilians, even as the military pummeled Mariupol, Kyiv, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities with indiscriminate barrages and airstrikes, killing untold numbers of civilians.
With the action in Ukraine in stark contrast with official declarations, the authorities acted quickly to control the message, shutting access to foreign media websites, along with Facebook and Instagram and moving to outlaw their parent company Meta as an “extremist” organization.
The tight lids on information have helped the Kremlin rally support of broad layers of the population who rely on state-controlled television as their main source of news. State TV programs carried an increasingly aggressive message against those who oppose the war.
Asked about incidents in which the apartment doors of war critics were spray-painted with the letter “Z” — a sign used to mark Russian military vehicles in Ukraine that has been heavily promoted by the state — Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described it as an “emotional” move by Putin’s supporters.
The campaign in support of the war saw Russian cities flooded with “Z” posters and vehicles emblazoned with it. School children were shown standing in groups in the shape of the letter or wearing clothes marked with a “Z.”
Despite the draconian new laws, tight controls on information and increasingly aggressive propaganda, however, thousands of Russians showed up at antiwar protests across the country to face immediate arrest.
In a powerful symbol of defiance, an employee of state television interrupted a live news program, holding a handmade sign protesting the war. Marina Ovsyannikova was fined the equivalent of $270, but still faces a criminal probe that could land her in prison.
One loud voice of dissent was that of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Putin’s fiercest political foe who is serving 2 1/2 years in prison and now faces a trial that could hand him a 13-year sentence.
In a speech at his trial Tuesday, Navalny warned that the war will lead to the breakup of Russia, saying that “everyone’s duty now is to oppose the war.”
9. Marine Corps unveils ‘influence officers’ for information fight
The Devil Dogs are adapting.
This gives new meaning to the doctrinal terms of area of operations, area of interest and area of influence. Also the close, deep, and rear fight concept is altered forever in the 21st Century.
Marine Corps unveils ‘influence officers’ for information fight
The Marine Corps has launched a new occupational field in the hopes of producing better specialists in the information warfare field.
The new 17XX information maneuver occupational field will bring in Marines from psychological operations, civil affairs field into the new occupational field, according to a press release.
The 17XX occupational field originally was created in 2018 and was known as the cyberspace operations occupational field.
The redesignation as the information maneuver field is a sign that the Corps views fights over misinformation and propaganda as existing within the same fight as cyber attacks and defense.
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The Marine Corps is taking lessons from the last three years to better optimize its tactical information forces, called MEF information groups.
In 2017 the Marine Corps created the first Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, or MIG, as a unit solely focused on the confluence of information and cyberwarfare.
However, some of the information-focused billets within the Marine information group were held by Marines as a free military occupational specialty. Essentially any Marine with the requisite skills could hold the billet regardless of their primary military occupational specialty.
But the nature of a free military occupational specialty made keeping the right people in the right job difficult.
“Marines gained valuable experience and skills at a Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) Information Group (MIG) or at combatant commands only to go back to their previous MOS causing us to repeat the cycle again, never getting Marines with more than three years of experience across information related billets,” Col. Jordan Walzer, the director for information maneuver division within the office of the deputy commandant for information, said in the press release.
“The professionalization of information related MOSs improves retention and readiness by avoiding Marines with valuable skills forced into deciding either to return to their prior MOS or exit the Marine Corps to continue following their passion,” add Walzer, the former II MIG commander.
The change comes with the addition of four primary military occupational specialties.
Marines between the rank of second lieutenant to lieutenant colonel will be eligible to become “influence officers,” while captains through lieutenant colonels would be eligible to become “maritime space officers,” according to the release.
Future administrative messages will detail how officers laterally can move into these new jobs, the release said.
On the enlisted end, Marines ranked sergeant through gunnery sergeant will be able to hold the new influence specialist military occupational specialty, while master sergeants and master gunnery sergeants will become influence chiefs, according to the release.
Marines holding the 0521 psychological operations specialists MOS, the 0531 civil affairs noncommissioned officer MOS and the 0551 information operations MOS automatically will become influence specialists, according to the press release.
To further fill in the ranks, the Marine Corps is planning to conduct roadshows selling the new occupational field to Marines at their home bases, Maj. Audrey Callanan, the new occupational fields manger, said in the release.
The Corps hopes the new occupational field not only will put it in a better standing in terms of information warfare, but help it retain better and more experienced Marines in the field.
“The Information Maneuver OCCFLD provides Marines the opportunity to continue doing what they are passionate about,” said Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, deputy commandant for information.
“When you put people first and provide them the opportunity to pursue a career they are passionate about, they give back tenfold to the team and our mission,” he added.
10. What the Reported Deaths of 4 Russian Generals Mean About the Fighting in Ukraine
Perhaps for the Russian Generals this is the order. "Come back with your shield - or on it" (Plutarch, Mor. 241). But not from Spartan mothers or Mother Russia but from Putin himself.
Excerpts:
"I can't confirm the reports about generals being killed in action," one senior U.S. defense official, who spoke under condition of anonymity, told Military.com during a briefing with reporters. "We just can't independently corroborate those."
Russian military experts said reports of four generals being killed in Ukraine are a testament to how well the Ukrainians are fighting and showcase some of the blatant errors Putin's forces are making.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the CSIS International Security Program and a retired Marine Corps colonel, said Russian generals have a tradition of leading troops into battle going back to the roots of the Soviet Union and the Red Army.
But the vulnerability of an invading force makes these officers more susceptible to fire in the open, he added.
"Every military recognizes that they'll take casualties, so everybody is replaceable from generals on down the privates," Cancian told Military.com. "The Russian generals are probably leading from the front. They're clearly getting out there, and there's an element of vulnerability to that."
What the Reported Deaths of 4 Russian Generals Mean About the Fighting in Ukraine
When Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, posted a graphic photo on Telegram this week showing the dead body of a Russian military officer, he claimed "the shoulder straps of a major general" were found nearby.
The body is believed to be that of Maj. Gen. Oleg Mityaev, an officer who reportedly commanded the 150th Motor Rifle Division and had fought in Syria, and died as Russian forces stormed the Ukrainian coastal city of Mariupol.
"This is a serious blow to the morale of Russian commanders. And the huge success of the Heroes of Mariupol," Gerashchenko wrote.
Mityaev's alleged death would make him the fourth Russian general reported killed in action in the first three weeks of the war, showcasing the intense resistance and heavy casualties President Vladimir Putin's forces have faced since invading Ukraine.
In addition to Mityaev's death, news that Maj. Gens. Vitaly Gerasimov, Andrei Kolesnikov and Andrei Sukhovetsky had all been killed in action was widely circulated by Ukrainian officials and some Russian media. But the alleged deaths have not been announced by Moscow officials or verified by the U.S. Department of Defense.
"I can't confirm the reports about generals being killed in action," one senior U.S. defense official, who spoke under condition of anonymity, told Military.com during a briefing with reporters. "We just can't independently corroborate those."
Russian military experts said reports of four generals being killed in Ukraine are a testament to how well the Ukrainians are fighting and showcase some of the blatant errors Putin's forces are making.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the CSIS International Security Program and a retired Marine Corps colonel, said Russian generals have a tradition of leading troops into battle going back to the roots of the Soviet Union and the Red Army.
But the vulnerability of an invading force makes these officers more susceptible to fire in the open, he added.
"Every military recognizes that they'll take casualties, so everybody is replaceable from generals on down the privates," Cancian told Military.com. "The Russian generals are probably leading from the front. They're clearly getting out there, and there's an element of vulnerability to that."
A Russian major general essentially equates to a brigadier general in the U.S. military. The American military tends to keep high-ranking officers behind the front lines, leaving a lot of the leadership in combat situations to junior officers and senior enlisted members who then communicate up the chain of command. Due in part to this structure, it's rare for the U.S. military to lose generals in combat zones. The most recent example was Army Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, who was gunned down by a disgruntled Afghan soldier in 2014.
Greene was the highest-ranking officer to be killed during America's wars in the Middle East and marked the highest-ranking fatality since the Vietnam War in 1972.
Jeffrey Edmonds, the former director for Russia on the National Security Council in the Obama administration and now a senior policy analyst at the CNA think tank in Washington, D.C., told Military.com that political pressure from Moscow is likely pushing many of Putin's military officers to the front lines.
"I think in this particular case, generals are much closer to the line because they're trying to force this move, probably because of political drivers behind it to just get in the city," Edmonds said. "They clearly still think that they can take Kyiv and then the rest of this thing will still fall."
Compounding the problem, the Russian military is currently short of personnel in the lower-level officer ranks, meaning a lot of the responsibility for movement is on generals in the field.
Col. John Barranco, a U.S. Marine Corps fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said targeting Russian generals may prove to be an effective strategy for the Ukrainians.
"I do think it hurts Russian morale, and I think it helps Ukrainian morale," Barranco told Military.com. "I think it has an impact tactically. These guys are up front for a reason."
Notably, Ukrainian special forces have been targeting Russian officers and military leaders with remote piloted drones and special weapons such as high-powered sniper rifles provided by NATO allies.
Even as officers in the field face heavy fire, there are reports that those back in Moscow have their own problems. Last week, Ukraine Defence Secretary Oleksiy Danilov claimed Putin had fired as many as eight generals over his country's military losses during the invasion.
While the Ukrainian and Russian governments have offered up conflicting casualty numbers, U.S. intelligence officials told The New York Times that at least 7,000 Russian troops have been killed, with another 14,000 to 21,000 injured in less than a month, significant numbers given the 150,000 troops believed to be in Ukraine.
By comparison, the U.S. lost around 7,000 service members over the course of two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Much of the Russian public doesn't know the extent of the casualties due to intense censorship and control of the media by Putin's regime. But reports of Russian soldiers surrendering or fleeing have been widely circulated by Ukraine and online.
As reports of casualties and officer deaths increase, some military experts believe Russian soldiers who are seeing the horrors firsthand are at a breaking point.
"The Russian citizens that know absolutely the most about this war are the soldiers that are getting shot at as we speak," Edmonds said. "The poor preparation, the lack of justification, the heavy casualties, the difficulty with it, all of it has contributed to this pretty low morale, from what we can tell."
11. Contrary to Russian media reports, 3 Tennessee Guardsmen were not killed in Ukraine
A key point. The Russians are using our own public affairs materials for their propaganda purposes.
Excerpts:
Russian media outlet Pravda reported that three members of the Tennessee National Guard died while fighting in Ukraine, calling the men “mercenaries,” and even listing names for those they claimed died.
“The three soldiers identified in the article are either current or former members of the Tennessee National Guard,” the NGB statement reads. “They are accounted for, safe and not, as the article headline erroneously states, US mercenaries killed in Donetsk People’s Republic.”
NGB’s statement also accused Russian media of targeting the individuals because of articles from 2018 carried on the Pentagon website DVIDS. Photos were taken of the troops at the time because they were deployed as part of the Multinational Training Group-Ukraine under the Tennessee Guard’s 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment.
Of course the knee jerk reaction would be to reign in public affairs and stop putting this kind of information on the internet for all to see and exploit. But I would recommend against that. We need to expose the Russian strategy and inoculate our people and the world to Russian influence operations. And by them using our public affairs information it actually makes it easier to expose the Russian malign activities.
Contrary to Russian media reports, 3 Tennessee Guardsmen were not killed in Ukraine
The National Guard Bureau is refuting claims that Tennessee National Guard members were killed in Ukraine, rebuking what officials called a “patently false” Russian media report.
Russian media outlet Pravda reported that three members of the Tennessee National Guard died while fighting in Ukraine, calling the men “mercenaries,” and even listing names for those they claimed died.
“The three soldiers identified in the article are either current or former members of the Tennessee National Guard,” the NGB statement reads. “They are accounted for, safe and not, as the article headline erroneously states, US mercenaries killed in Donetsk People’s Republic.”
NGB’s statement also accused Russian media of targeting the individuals because of articles from 2018 carried on the Pentagon website DVIDS. Photos were taken of the troops at the time because they were deployed as part of the Multinational Training Group-Ukraine under the Tennessee Guard’s 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment.
More than 200 soldiers assisted the Ukrainian armed forces during the 2018 mission. While there, they helped with the development of cadre, ranges and training areas; equipment and instrumentation requirements, and a realistic operational training environment.
All members of the Tennessee National Guard returned home safely in 2019, though other Guard units have since rotated through.
The 160 soldiers of the Florida National Guard deployed to Ukraine since November were ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to leave the country amid increasing concern of a Russian attack in mid-February.
Those soldiers were assigned to the 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team and were ordered to reposition elsewhere in Europe.
12. Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine
Excerpts:
The “Nazi” slur’s sudden emergence shows how Mr. Putin is trying to use stereotypes, distorted reality and his country’s lingering World War II trauma to justify his invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin is casting the war as a continuation of Russia’s fight against evil in what is known in the country as the Great Patriotic War, apparently counting on lingering Russian pride in the victory over Nazi Germany to carry over into support for Mr. Putin’s attack.
“This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive,” scholars of genocide and Nazism from around the world said in an open letter after Mr. Putin invaded. While Ukraine has far-right groups, they said, “none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is Jewish.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Ukrainians say that the horrors of Russia’s invasion show that if any country needs to be denazified, it is Russia. Its war has brought devastation to Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and widespread suffering to Kyiv.
And Mr. Putin, in a speech on Wednesday, used the us-versus-them language of a dictator to proclaim that Russian society needed a “self-purification” from the pro-Western “scum and traitors” in its midst.
Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine
March 17, 2022, 6:53 p.m. ET
Billboards quoting President Vladimir V. Putin in Simferopol, Crimea, this month. The one on the right reads “We want the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”Credit...Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters
Ukraine’s government is “openly neo-Nazi” and “pro-Nazi,” controlled by “little Nazis,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says.
American officials led by President Biden are responsible for the “Nazification” of Ukraine, one of Russia’s top lawmakers says, and should be tried before a court. In fact, another lawmaker says, it is time to create a “modern analogy to the Nuremberg Tribunal” as Russia prepares to “denazify” Ukraine.
In case the message was not clear, the Kremlin’s marquee weekly news show aired black-and-white footage on Sunday of German Nazis being hanged on what is now central Kyiv’s Independence Square. The men drop, dangling from a long beam, and the crowd cheers.
The language of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been dominated by the word “Nazi” — a puzzling assertion about a country whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and who last fall signed a law combating anti-Semitism. Mr. Putin only began to apply the word regularly to the country’s present-day government in recent months, though he has long referred to Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution of 2014 as a fascist coup.
The “Nazi” slur’s sudden emergence shows how Mr. Putin is trying to use stereotypes, distorted reality and his country’s lingering World War II trauma to justify his invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin is casting the war as a continuation of Russia’s fight against evil in what is known in the country as the Great Patriotic War, apparently counting on lingering Russian pride in the victory over Nazi Germany to carry over into support for Mr. Putin’s attack.
“This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive,” scholars of genocide and Nazism from around the world said in an open letter after Mr. Putin invaded. While Ukraine has far-right groups, they said, “none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is Jewish.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Ukrainians say that the horrors of Russia’s invasion show that if any country needs to be denazified, it is Russia. Its war has brought devastation to Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and widespread suffering to Kyiv.
And Mr. Putin, in a speech on Wednesday, used the us-versus-them language of a dictator to proclaim that Russian society needed a “self-purification” from the pro-Western “scum and traitors” in its midst.
Many believe that Mr. Putin’s stated determination to “denazify” Ukraine is code for his aim to topple the government and repress pro-Western activists and groups. It is an echo of how he has used Russian remembrance of the nation’s suffering and victory in World War II to militarize Russian society and justify domestic crackdowns and foreign aggression.
Ukrainians have closed ranks behind Mr. Zelensky, however, causing Mr. Putin to escalate the brutality of his war. Mr. Putin’s “denazification” mission increasingly means that he is determined to “destroy all Ukrainians,” the country’s information minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, wrote on Facebook, in Russian, last week.
“This is worse than Nazism,” Mr. Tkachenko wrote.
It may seem hard to fathom that regular Russians could accept Mr. Putin’s comparison of neighboring Ukraine — where millions of Russians have relatives and friends — to Nazi Germany, the country that invaded the Soviet Union at the cost of some 27 million Soviet lives.
Like many lies, Mr. Putin’s claim about a Nazi-controlled Ukraine has a hall-of-mirrors connection to reality. Jewish groups and others have, in fact, criticized Ukraine since its pro-Western revolution in 2014 for allowing Ukrainian independence fighters who at one point sided with Nazi Germany to be venerated as national heroes.
Some fringe nationalist groups, who have no representation in Parliament, use racist rhetoric and symbolism associated with Nazi Germany.
Eduard Dolinsky, director general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, a group representing Ukrainian Jews, said that some in the country do derisively refer to those far-right groups as “Naziki” — “little Nazis” — as Mr. Putin does. On social media, Mr. Dolinsky in recent years has frequently called attention to things like the renaming of a major stadium in western Ukraine for Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian nationalist leader. He commanded troops that were implicated in mass killings of Jews and Poles during World War II.
Ukrainian nationalist party supporters marching in Lviv in 2018 to commemorate the death of Roman Shukhevych, who commanded troops implicated in mass killings of Jews and Poles in World War II. Credit...Pavlo Palamarchuk/European Pressphoto Agency
“This problem did exist and continues to,” Mr. Dolinsky said in a phone interview from western Ukraine, a few days after fleeing Kyiv. “But it has of course receded 10 times in importance compared to the threat posed by Russia in its alleged fight against Nazism.”
Mr. Dolinsky’s posts about far-right issues in Ukraine were often amplified by Russian officials, who used them as evidence that the country was dominated by Nazis. Some Ukrainians criticized him for playing into Russian propaganda, but Mr. Dolinsky says he has no regrets — and notes he has steadfastly refused invitations to appear on Russian state television.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst who appears frequently on state television, claims that Ukraine’s modern-day Nazis are not anti-Jewish but anti-Russian — because that is the agenda that he claims Western intelligence agencies set for them. In Russia’s increasingly convoluted propaganda narrative, reprised by Mr. Putin in his speech Wednesday, the West is backing Ukraine’s “Nazis” as a way to degrade Ukraine’s Russian heritage and use the country as a platform to destroy Russia.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to Know
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“We are being convinced again and again that the Kyiv regime, for which its Western masters have set the task of creating an aggressive ‘anti-Russia,’ is indifferent to the fate of the people of Ukraine themselves,” Mr. Putin said.
Mr. Markov says the Kremlin started using the “Nazi” terminology to “get through to Western politicians and media” about the necessity of invading Ukraine. But the use of the word also appears geared toward Russians, for whom remembrance of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany remains perhaps the single most powerful element of a unifying national identity.
Now, the narrative goes, Mr. Putin is finally carrying out the Soviet Union’s unfinished business.
A patriotic mural showing Soviet pilots from World War II, who were photographed during the Victory Parade in 1945 in Moscow. The sign in Russian reads: “The saved world remembers you!”Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
“From the point of view of Russian society, today’s Ukrainian fascists are successors to the cause of the fascism of that time,” Mr. Markov said, echoing a Kremlin talking point.
Even as state television ignores the devastation that Russian forces are causing in Ukraine, and the mounting tally of Russian casualties, it is filled with reports about Ukrainian extremist groups — ones that in reality occupy a marginal place in Ukrainian society. Reports about streets being renamed for Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who at one point sided with Nazi Germany against the Soviets — before the Germans turned against him and put him in a concentration camp — offend older generations of Russians who heard about the evils of Nazi collaborators.
With Ukrainian nationalist groups now playing an important role in defending their country from the Russian invasion, Western supporters of Ukraine have struggled for the right tone. Facebook last week said it was making an exception to its anti-extremism policies to allow praise for Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion military unit, “strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard.”
Russia’s state media seized upon Facebook’s move as the latest proof that the West supported Nazis in Ukraine. They also highlight it when Western politicians, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, greet Mr. Zelensky with “Slava Ukraini!” — “Glory to Ukraine!” — a greeting used by Bandera’s troops.
“For people socialized in this Soviet culture, these are definitely negative associations,” said Vladimir Malakhov, a historian at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences who studies nationalism and ethnicity. “It’s anti-Semitism, it’s being anti-Russian, it’s radicalism.”
Mr. Dolinsky, of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, noted that there have been many Jews among the 3 million Ukrainians who have fled the country, and that some may not return. Mr. Putin’s war may thus deal a devastating blow to Ukraine’s Jewish community, he said.
“This will be among the results of this ‘denazification,’” Mr. Dolinsky said. “Our lives have been destroyed.”
Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Catherine Porter from Toronto.
13. Analysis | What a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might look like
Caution. A reason not to be too optimistic.
The prospect of any peace deal is predicated on Putin understanding that he has bit off more than he can chew, and that’s a really big if right now. Some have argued that he would even turn to low-grade nuclear weapons before risking defeat in Ukraine.
John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told me he’s skeptical, noting that while Lavrov has suggested an opening, Putin has not. But he doesn’t rule out a deal, especially if the Russians are pushed to their limits on the battlefield, and if the West maintains resolve on sanctions and ups the ante on military equipment for Ukraine.
“It boils down to this, Putin still thinks that this is an invasion he can somehow win on the battlefield,” Herbst said. “If he is ever able to reach the point where he understands that’s not possible, then maybe they begin to negotiate seriously.”
Analysis | What a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might look like
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With Russian troops bogged down in the fight against a defiant but battered Ukraine, both Moscow and Kyiv say the prospect of a negotiated settlement is growing. Yet, with the Kremlin seeking an end to Ukraine as a sovereign nation, and Ukraine still claiming land lost to pro-Russian forces almost a decade ago, can there really be a middle ground?
The short answer is: It’s possible.
Suspicion abounds over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, with considerable fears that a Russian diplomatic opening is a ruse to buy time to gather reinforcements for a second-phase assault. Putin is certainly not talking like a man of peace. This week, he called Russians who opposed the invasion “traitors” and “scum,” while seeking to portray the war as nothing short of a struggle for Russia’s survival.
But with the tenacious Ukrainian resistance exceeding expectations in the face of a far superior Russian force — and with Western sanctions slamming the Russian economy — there’s a chance the new battleground calculus has the Kremlin fishing for a consolation prize. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke this week of “hope for reaching a compromise.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that the Russians are being “more realistic” at the negotiating table.
With the two sides far apart, what could a deal look like?
The main sticking points
1. Neutrality: For Russia, an insistence on Ukraine’s neutrality is probably the most important demand. The war is rooted in Ukraine’s desire to join the West, aspiring to prosperity and self-determination through memberships in NATO and the European Union. A thriving democracy on Russia’s border linked to the West — especially one filled with as many Russian speakers as Ukraine has — could serve as a tempting model for the Russian people, endangering Putin’s autocratic grip. Publicly, though, Putin claims that Kyiv’s lurch toward the West amounts to a security threat for Moscow, even though Washington and its allies have put Ukrainian membership in those clubs on the slow track.
2. Western security guarantees: For Ukraine, any pledge of neutrality while it’s still holding its own on the battlefield would likely need to come with a pledge, acknowledged by Russia, that Western powers would come to its aid if Kyiv were threatened again. This is perhaps the stickiest point for Moscow, as it amounts to some acceptance of allied powers, if not NATO itself, involved in Ukraine’s future defense. One way to make this more palatable to the Russians could be a clause limiting the types of weapons kept within Ukraine’s border.
3. Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk: The war in Ukraine really started nearly a decade ago, when, after a public uprising that drove out a sitting president, Ukraine signed an association agreement with the European Union and rejected a loan deal with Russia. A furious Kremlin responded by invading and annexing the Crimean Peninsula, while sponsoring and sending in proxies to take over Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
As a prelude to invasion, Putin officially recognized the independence of those two separatist provinces. As a settlement condition, Russia may demand recognition by Kyiv and the international community of its annexation of Crimea, as well as de facto Russian control over Donbas — things the Ukrainians have pledged they would never do.
How Ukraine could buy peace
Academics Arvid Bell and Dana Wolf argue on Harvard University’s Russia Matters site that Ukraine could acquiesce on major points while still maintaining sovereignty. First, it would need to agree to self-imposed neutrality — officially giving up on its NATO dream, which is enshrined in its constitution. Zelensky has already suggested he is willing to yield on this key point, admitting publicly this week that NATO membership is not in the cards. The Russians will want this in writing and could require a constitutional amendment to strike Kyiv’s NATO ambitions.
In a worst-case scenario, Bell and Wolf argue, Ukraine might also need to recognize Crimea as part of Russia and the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk. Russian “peacekeepers” may be required to remain in Donbas, contrary to Kyiv’s insistence that Russia must pull back every soldier from its borders. Despite its stated opposition, some observers see Ukraine as potentially willing to finesse a deal on Crimea and the east, as long as it means a broader Russian troop withdrawal and international security guarantees.
Such a deal might be hard to stomach for the Ukrainian people. But Zelensky — who has come to be seen a hero in Ukraine and beyond — has the stature to sell an unpalatable agreement. If the Russians would be willing to acknowledge Ukraine’s right to exist and permit Western security guarantees, he’d be getting a new lease on his country’s future.
Benjamin Haddad, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, told Today’s WorldView that one important bonus Ukraine could push for is closing the door on NATO in exchange for an open one to the European Union. Moscow’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said Moscow cited Austria and Sweden this week as examples for Ukraine. Neutral countries outside NATO, both are prosperous members of the European Union. But it remains unclear whether Putin, the decision-maker in Russia who has expressed a maximalist line, would seriously consider allowing a flourishing democracy to exist on Russia’s doorstep.
“Russia has said no to the blocs, both the E.U. and NATO. But if you were able to decouple this, and say they won’t join NATO, — so you don’t have the military dimension, in exchange — you could start a process to the E.U.,” Haddad said. “I don’t think that was acceptable to Russia before the war, but I think we’re in a maybe more dynamic situation now.”
The Financial Times on Wednesday reported on a 15-point deal being mediated largely by Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. It included provisions that Ukraine would not join NATO, or allow foreign troops on its soil, but would still be able to keep its armed forces. The Ukrainians, however, have downplayed the document as “a draft” that represents Russian demands. U.S. officials have welcomed positive diplomatic signs but say they have seen no indications that Putin is serious about changing course.
Putin’s nightmare
Russia’s worst-case scenario is one where Putin must effectively accept defeat. This could see, Bell and Wolf argue, a deal that agrees to Russia withdrawing all troops from Ukraine, including the ones in Donbas, and a walk back of Moscow’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent. Crimea would remain part of Russia but would be demilitarized. Ukraine would be allowed to pursue E.U. membership but would not join NATO — which even in defeat Putin is likely to see as a red line.
In return, the West would lift all sanctions on Russia and agree to security talks with Moscow on the future of security and defense in Europe. Many observers, however, view Putin as unlikely to concede this much given how it would impact his stature at home. What is a strongman, after all, if he is no longer strong? He has staked out an extreme line — calling for regime change and insisting Kyiv is run by Nazis despite the fact that Zelensky is Jewish and had family die in the Holocaust.
But if you read the tea leaves of Putin’s words, there may be a subtle sign of a shift.
Rose Gottemoeller, an American diplomat who served as deputy secretary general of NATO from 2016 to 2019, told the Financial Times’ Rachman Review podcast this week that Putin has notably refrained from reasserting demands for Ukrainian regime change in recent days.
“The Kremlin is not admitting it, but they have now begun to modify some of their demands,” Gottemoeller said. “We have not heard Mr. Putin say, for instance, ‘denazification’ for the last week.”
Why a deal might not happen
The prospect of any peace deal is predicated on Putin understanding that he has bit off more than he can chew, and that’s a really big if right now. Some have argued that he would even turn to low-grade nuclear weapons before risking defeat in Ukraine.
John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told me he’s skeptical, noting that while Lavrov has suggested an opening, Putin has not. But he doesn’t rule out a deal, especially if the Russians are pushed to their limits on the battlefield, and if the West maintains resolve on sanctions and ups the ante on military equipment for Ukraine.
“It boils down to this, Putin still thinks that this is an invasion he can somehow win on the battlefield,” Herbst said. “If he is ever able to reach the point where he understands that’s not possible, then maybe they begin to negotiate seriously.”
14. These are the contenders for rebranding Army posts with Confederate namesakes
These are the contenders for rebranding Army posts with Confederate namesakes
Some of them will be familiar to anyone who has followed along on the renaming saga, including Roy Benavidez, Hal and Julia Moore and Alwyn Cashe. Others will be familiar for their notoriety as high-ranking military and civilian leaders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower and Colin Powell.
“It’s important that the names we recommend for these installations appropriately reflect the courage, values and sacrifices of our diverse military men and women,” retired Navy Adm. Michelle Howard, chair of the Naming Commission, said in a release Thursday. “We also are considering the local and regional significance of names and their potential to inspire and motivate our service members.”
The choices were narrowed down from more than 34,000 submissions, including 3,670 unique names, according to the release. The names were gathered both from an online form and from site visits to the posts to speak with troops there and surrounding community leaders.
The posts on the list include Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Rucker, Alabama; Fort Polk, Louisiana; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; and Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia.
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The commission has received 27,000 suggestions.
Fort Belvoir had been on the list when the commission stood up, but not because there was a Confederate general named Belvoir. The post was originally named Camp A. A. Humphreys when it opened in 1917, but was changed to Belvoir in 1935 at the request of a Virginia congressman who wanted to commemorate the historical Belvoir plantation it used to be.
The Naming Commission decided that renaming Fort Belvoir doesn’t specifically fall in line with its mandate under the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, but it will recommend that the Defense Department undertake its own process to rename it, according to the release.
The next step will be more site visits to discuss options with installation leaders, before a final list of recommendations goes to Congress by Oct. 1. After that, the Army has another year to make the changes final.
The commission is also considering a wide range of other things to rename, including the cruiser Chancellorsville and the oceanographic survey ship Maury. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee will also likely be stripped from roads, buildings and specifically a handful of commemorations at the U.S. Military Academy, his alma mater.
At the Naval Academy, Buchanan House, the superintendent’s quarters, Buchanan Road and Maury Hall have all been considered for renaming.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT
15. The False Promise of Arming Insurgents
The author (from the Quincy Institute - which is partly funded by the Koch Brothers who continue to operate in Russia) provides a useful historical survey of problems in support of insurgencies and resistance. We need to learn the lessons.
The hardest action in unconventional warfare is demobilization armed fighters (now phase 7 "transition" of a US sponsored insurgency but traditional UW doctrine called it demobilization). There is a possible advantage to the situation in Ukraine. Since the preparations began before the war the militias may have been trained to mobilize for training and then stand down and return to normal life. But most importantly when the Ukrainians defeat the Russians and the Russians withdraw as an occupying force the Ukrainian government will possibly have an easier time demobilizing the guerrilla fighters. Of course one of the weapons we will want them to account for and secure will be the Stingers since they could be the most deadly if they fall into the hands of groups who will use them for terrorist purposes (e.g.,shooting down civilian airliners).
But I have to ask the author: If you were under attack from the Russians would you not want to employ all means necessary to protect your nation's sovereignty and people? As I overheard a general once say to another general who objected to the plan for unconventional warfare in a certain country: "Why would I want to give up a capability that I know we will need in the future?"
While there are important lessons from this article, one of them mentioned - the tradeoff between size and secrecy (or synchronization and operational security) requires further in depth analysis because of modern conditions. In an information environment like Ukraine it may be difficult to conduct covert action (deniable CIA activities) or clandestine operations (Special Forces low visibility activities) in the old school manner. More operations and activities are likely to be exposed sooner rather than later. We need to plan for that and take appropriate measures. In fact we should try to figure out a way to use modern transparency to our advantage rather than decry that we can no longer conduct effective covert or clandestine operations.
Despite the author's cautionary conclusion I strongly support aiding the Ukraine resistance (but I recognize my bias for this type of action so decide for yourselves). I will bet on good intentions that we can make good and this time we have a chance to avoid the road to hell.
Conclusion:
U.S. policymakers, moreover, should be prepared to remain involved in Ukraine for the long haul if an insurgency does indeed take hold and the administration backs it. According to a 2010 RAND study, the average modern insurgency lasts ten years and ends in defeat. “Full-blown insurgencies are messy affairs,” the authors conclude. “External sponsors sometimes back winning causes but rarely emerge with a clear victory.”
When one sees the images of courageous Ukrainians taking up arms to defend their homeland, fighting against long odds, the urge to help is hard to resist. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. While covertly coming to their aid may appear to be the prudent choice among an array of unattractive options, history suggests that it is a risky gamble.
The False Promise of Arming Insurgents
America’s Spotty Record Warrants Caution in Ukraine
March 18, 2022
As Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine continues, it looks increasingly likely that, sooner or later, Russian troops will occupy much or all of Ukraine. Faced with that prospect, U.S. and allied policymakers have no doubt begun to consider what measures can be taken should that come to pass, especially given the likelihood that a determined Ukrainian insurgency will continue to resist Russian occupation. As they study whether and how to support this resistance, including with a steady flow of arms, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time the United States has faced this question: during the Cold War, Washington backed more than more than two dozen insurgencies fighting Soviet-backed governments or Soviet occupation, from Albania in the 1940s to Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The history of these efforts should be studied carefully as policymakers face the prospect of beginning another one in Ukraine. That record should counsel caution for the United States and its allies. In most cases, support brought few gains, heavy costs, and serious unintended consequences, and demanded a much longer and more significant commitment than anticipated at the start.
Hard Truths
The United States’ record for covertly arming foreign dissidents is remarkably poor. When members of President Barack Obama’s administration debated covertly arming Syrian opposition forces in 2012 and 2013, for instance, they asked the CIA to conduct an internal assessment of the agency’s record for such operations. The results, in the words of one former senior administration official, were “pretty dour.” As Obama later put it in an interview with The New Yorker, “I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.”
That should have come as no surprise: out of 35 U.S. attempts to covertly arm foreign dissidents during the Cold War, only four succeeded in bringing U.S. allies to power. Notably, an early U.S. operation to support Ukrainian nationalists in their bid to secede from the Soviet Union during the early Cold War was a failure. The U.S.-backed Ukrainian partisans were simply no match for Soviet intelligence, which easily infiltrated and then brutally suppressed the movement. Indeed, the operation ended so disastrously for the U.S.-backed partisans that a declassified CIA history later concluded, “In the long run, the Agency’s effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain using Ukrainian agents was ill-fated and tragic.”
The major challenge facing covert operations is a fundamental tradeoff between size and secrecy. Whatever motives exist for one side to covertly intervene in the first place will also place a limit on how far it will go during the operation. If the opposing side is willing to escalate further, the covert aid’s ultimate accomplishment is prolonging the bloodshed. The turning point in Washington’s covert intervention in the Syrian civil war came, for instance, after U.S.-supported forces appeared to have the upper hand. During the summer of 2015, U.S.-backed fighters began making major advances into government-controlled territory in northern Syria, leading many analysts to declare that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s days were numbered. Rather than letting these advances go unchecked, however, Russia decided to enter the war directly and initiated a brutal, indiscriminate bombing campaign in rebel territory—a use of deadly force that Washington was unwilling to match. There, and in Chechnya, Putin has demonstrated a willingness to resort to brutal civilian repression when challenged.
This suggests that if a Ukrainian insurgency takes hold and the United States and its Western allies back it, the harder Russia will repress the Ukrainian people in response. Although it is certainly possible that Western-backed insurgents would ultimately win a battle of resolve, Russia has several advantages. Unlike the West, Russia views Ukraine as a vital strategic interest, and Russia’s conventional military superiority and geographic proximity to the country would allow them to easily deploy and replenish their air and ground forces. Moreover, Ukraine’s terrain is ill-suited to support an insurgency. As the political scientist Barry Posen has pointed out, “The flat and open terrain in Ukraine is largely unfavorable to guerrilla warfare. This is particularly true in southeastern Ukraine, where Russian aggression seems most likely, given the lack of mountains, forests, or swamps for insurgents to use as base camps.”
The United States’ record for covertly arming foreign dissidents is remarkably poor.
It is important to note that the larger a covert operation, the more likely it is to be discovered or infiltrated. During the Cold War, for instance, Herbert Weisshart, a CIA officer involved in multiple U.S. covert actions, estimated that even in an anti-Soviet resistance cell of just ten individuals, the odds that Soviet security forces would penetrate the group were 50 percent. In Ukraine today, Russia may enjoy even greater intelligence advantages given the historic ties between the two countries.
And in any case where the United States gets involved in backing insurgencies, there is the danger of falling victim to mission creep or inadvertent military escalation. The basic problem, as U.S. National Intelligence Council Chair Gregory Treverton explained, is that “once covert interventions begin, no matter how hesitantly or provisionally, they can be hard to stop. Operation realities intrude, with deadlines attached. New stakes are created, changing the balance of risks and rewards as perceived by political leaders … the burden of proof switches from those who would propose covert action to those who would oppose it.”
Lessons From the Past
It is important to note that because covert operations are, by their nature, secretive missions involving foreign intermediaries, they are often rife with opportunities for misattribution and escalation. Biden Administration officials have stated the United States could potentially train insurgents in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia for cross-border operations into Ukraine. There is an inherent danger in this approach, however: Moscow might be willing to risk cross-border incursions into NATO territory to dry up supply lines to anti-Russian fighters, just as the United States bombed Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War to stop infiltrations from the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Likewise, the aforementioned 2012 CIA study found that foreign insurgencies seldom succeeded without “direct American support on the ground.” If a Ukrainian insurgency were to falter, the United States might be tempted to dispatch special operations forces into Russian-occupied territories. If these troops were killed or captured by Russian forces, the risks of escalation would grow even stronger.
We should not forget that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident—and Congress’s subsequent resolution of the same name that authorized the United States’ major escalation in the Vietnam War—came after a U.S.-backed covert operation in North Vietnam went awry. It began when North Vietnamese torpedo boats neared an American destroyer while searching for South Vietnamese commandos involved in an ongoing U.S.-backed covert program to raid and bomb targets along the North Vietnamese coast. The destroyer, the USS Maddox, which was conducting an intelligence-gathering mission in the area, fired three warning shots in their direction. The North Vietnamese boats returned fire. President Lyndon B. Johnson later used this attack on an American ship in international waters to justify the United States’ full-scale involvement in the war (while omitting mention of how the U.S.-backed covert mission may have helped set the stage for the incident).
As that example demonstrates, if the United States would need to tread carefully in Ukraine. Today, Russia has its nuclear forces on “special combat readiness” and is using an outdated early warning system to monitor for signs of a foreign attack. Washington thus needs to be cautious about the risk that a covert operation could somehow be erroneously perceived by Moscow as an attack. Although this warning may sound alarmist, anyone who has studied the history of nuclear accidents knows that there have been plenty of disturbing close calls and false alarms in peacetime—let alone when Russia is engaged in major combat 500 miles from Moscow.
A final case for intervention is that, regardless of the ultimate outcome, arming an insurgency would dramatically increase the costs of a Russian occupation, just as U.S. support for jihadi insurgents in Afghanistan during the 1980s helped undermine the Soviet Union. Recently, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed out that “a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan” and suggested that could provide a “model” for a U.S.-backed Ukrainian resistance.
Any time the United States gets involved in backing insurgencies, there is the danger of mission creep.
But Afghanistan is a curious example to invoke. While the Afghan rebels did succeed in driving out the Soviets, it came at enormous cost to the Afghan people: more than a million Afghans were killed in the Soviet-Afghan War and millions more fled the country. That’s hardly a fate to wish for the Ukrainians.
Afghanistan is also the quintessential example of the unintentional blowback that covert operations often provoke. After all, that U.S. intervention ended up paving the way for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan and eventually provide a safe haven for al Qaeda terrorists, some of whom had been part of the jihadi insurgent forces that had received U.S. aid. As Clinton herself put it, there were “unintended consequences.” It is impossible to know what the potential blowback from a potential U.S. covert action in Ukraine could look like, but there are already factors that should give policymakers pause. Those include reports that in recent years the CIA has been secretly funding a controversial ultranationalist Ukrainian military unit, the Azov Battalion—a group with neo-Nazi members that the FBI has tied to far-right extremist groups within the United States.
U.S. policymakers, moreover, should be prepared to remain involved in Ukraine for the long haul if an insurgency does indeed take hold and the administration backs it. According to a 2010 RAND study, the average modern insurgency lasts ten years and ends in defeat. “Full-blown insurgencies are messy affairs,” the authors conclude. “External sponsors sometimes back winning causes but rarely emerge with a clear victory.”
When one sees the images of courageous Ukrainians taking up arms to defend their homeland, fighting against long odds, the urge to help is hard to resist. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. While covertly coming to their aid may appear to be the prudent choice among an array of unattractive options, history suggests that it is a risky gamble.
LINDSEY O'ROURKE is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. She is also the author of Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War.
16. Opinion | Watching Russia’s military failures is exhilarating. But a cornered Putin is dangerous.
Ignatius offers some wise cautionary points. But the key point which he talks around, is our own self deterrence. We are deterring ourselves from all necessary action and even from lesser actions because of our fear of escalation and nuclear war. Maybe we have to self deter and self limit our actions but we need to understand what that does in terms of national security over the long term and how it will impact the calculus and decision making of other threats actors as well as Putin.
I do fear the paradox - the harder we try to prevent escalation and nuclear war, the more we may be making it likely given the nature of Putin and the decision making of revisionist, rogue and totalitarian powers possessing nuclear weapons.
Opinion | Watching Russia’s military failures is exhilarating. But a cornered Putin is dangerous.
This was Volodymyr Zelensky’s week. The Ukrainian president taught America and the world the truth of Napoleon’s admonition: “In war, moral is to physical as three is to one.”
Zelensky has taken the West with him, emotionally, to the barricades of Kyiv. He evokes the idealism of the popular uprisings that swept Europe in the 19th century and inspired Victor Hugo’s classic novel, “Les Miserables.” We know the rousing chorus of the musical version: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!”
But this isn’t a musical. And it would be a mistake not to cast a cold, unsentimental eye at the Ukraine crisis before it damages the world irreparably. Even as we try to support Zelensky and his noble fight against President Vladimir Putin, we should understand the dangers ahead.
What are the hidden risks of this moment, beyond the horrifying destruction of Ukraine and its people? Here’s a summary of what I’ve gathered from recent conversations with people who are watching the Ukraine war as closely and rationally as possible:
— The longer this war continues, the more dangerous it will become. Russia will bleed out, in the corpses of its invaders and the ruin of its economy. The world will cheer. But as this process continues, a desperate Putin may become more likely to escalate this crisis toward a world war. A combination of military pressure and diplomacy that presses Putin toward a settlement is in everyone’s interest. Compromises will be anguishing, but necessary.
— Putin’s military failures have been exhilarating to watch. The bad guy seems to be losing. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Putin’s menace increases at home and abroad as he is cornered. It was chilling to watch his rant Wednesday against Russian “scum and traitors” that oppose him. The intelligence services of every rational country on the planet should consider ways to reduce Putin’s unchecked power before he moves from nasty bully to mass murderer.
— The Ukraine war’s creepiest byproduct is its demonstration of the utility of nuclear weapons. NATO isn’t intervening directly in this war with a no-fly zone because Russia has 4,000 nuclear weapons. It’s that simple. And let’s be honest: Would Putin have invaded if Ukraine had kept its nuclear arsenal back in 1994, when the United States pressed it to disarm? I doubt it. The lesson won’t be lost on Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea — go down the list. This war may prove the greatest stimulus to nuclear proliferation in history.
— Russia’s invasion has also shown that a nuclear power can engage in vicious regional aggression without paying the most severe price. America and its NATO allies are deterred in this conflict, but Russia isn’t. The paradox of our restraint is that it enables the unrestrained. Somehow, the balance of deterrence must be restored.
— President Biden and his allies should begin planning for the endgame of this war. Putin doesn’t have a plan, but neither does the West. What’s needed is an architecture of security so that neither Russia nor Ukraine feels threatened. Putin kept telling us for 15 years that there was trouble ahead; he meant it. The genius of the leaders of 1945 was that they built a structure for peace: the United Nations; the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund. The world will be rebuilt after this war; this reconstruction needs Russian and Chinese input or it will fail.
— Russia will be in disarray after this war, politically and economically. It will be tempting to let that mess fester, especially if Russia continues to occupy parts of Ukraine. But beware: As bad as Putin has been, there are future versions of Russian despotism that could be even more destabilizing for Europe. A punitive peace after the horrors of World War I spawned the nightmare of Nazi Germany. Russia is in radical decline; we are watching, in effect, the second fall of the Soviet Union. Beware the dangers as Russia crumbles.
— The Ukraine war may be just a rehearsal for a more ruinous conflict to come. That was the case with the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905; the world assumed that Russia would sweep to a quick victory, but its poor performance prefigured the fall of the czarist monarchy and was in many ways a prelude to World War I. Many of the most hideous features of 1914 had a trial run in 1905.
Diplomacy may seem irrelevant at a moment when Russian bombs are falling on Ukrainian maternity hospitals and opera houses. Zelensky needs more weapons to fight back against a tyrant — and pressure Russia to accept a cease-fire. But Zelensky’s allies should also be thinking about how to put the pieces back together when this war ends.
17. Biden's EIKO Sanctions Concession Is a Gift to the Ayatollahs
Excerpt:
The new Iran deal will make EIKO—a lead culprit in the clerical regime’s corruption, plunder of state resources, human rights abuses, terrorism, and regional adventurism—much richer than ever before. This is Biden’s gift to the ayatollahs. It is the price of negotiations built around the hope that Tehran will be grateful for Biden’s commitment to diplomacy rather than eager to exploit it to the hilt.
Biden's EIKO Sanctions Concession Is a Gift to the Ayatollahs
Lifting sanctions on EIKO will not advance Joe Biden’s purported goal of a nuclear détente with Tehran.
Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed to “putting human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy” and defined “combatting corruption as a core U.S. national security interest.” Yet, as part of its impending deal with Iran, the administration will lift sanctions on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his $100 billion corporate empire-cum-slush fund known as EIKO, which stands for Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order. Thanks to the extraordinary power it wields as Khamenei’s economic arm, EIKO is essentially an extortion racket that has seized a dominant position in Iran’s economy through corruption, arbitrary confiscation of private property, denial of due process, and preferential access to investment and bidding contracts. Under Khamenei’s direct control, EIKO is also tax-exempt and completely opaque. It enables him to fund every pet project he wishes and shake down ordinary Iranians to replenish its coffers.
Lifting sanctions on EIKO does not advance Joe Biden’s purported goal of a nuclear détente with Tehran. The move would simply be a payoff to the supreme leader to secure his approval of a new nuclear deal.
The Obama administration sanctioned EIKO in June 2013, along with thirty-seven subsidiaries in Iran and overseas, which the Treasury Department’s top counterterrorism official described as “a shadowy network of off-the-books front companies” whose job is to “hide billions of dollars of corporate profits at the expense of the Iranian people.” Nonetheless, as part of the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the United States delisted EIKO. Then, as now, the move had nothing to do with nuclear issues. It was a reward for the supreme leader.
EIKO is an immense conglomerate that a 2013 Reuters investigation valued at almost $100 billion. More than half of this wealth, by Reuters’ estimates, consists of real estate often acquired illegally through arbitrary confiscation and judicial arm twisting at the expense of dissidents, religious minorities like the Baha’is, and Iranians residing abroad. Given that Reuters’ assessment drew from land, real estate, and stock exchange values as old as 2008, EIKO may be worth much more once sanctions are lifted and, more importantly, will generate significantly more revenue than it already does.
As my colleagues Behnam Ben Taleblu and Saeed Ghasseminejad noted in 2017, “EIKO has become a vehicle for Khamenei to receive huge sums of money without any oversight, solidifying his grip on the country’s byzantine power structure atop which he sits.” This corruption, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, was responsible for delays in the acquisition and distribution of life-saving personal protection equipment (PPE) for Iran’s civilian population. EIKO was also reportedly hoarding PPE to profit from its citizens’ misery.
EIKO’s companies occupy virtually every sector of Iran’s economy, ranging from real estate and energy to wealth management funds, insurance, and pharmaceuticals, making it a formidable competitor for foreign bids and contracts. Foreign companies returning to Iran’s market will soon discover that their business ventures all have the supreme leader as a silent partner; their investments will have to compromise with the corruption he supervises. And the revenue they generate may end up facilitating the covert advancement of nuclear weapons.
As the Treasury Department made clear in its 2013 sanctions announcement, EIKO was engaged in “assisting the Iranian government’s circumvention of U.S. and international sanctions.” The announcement followed the revelation in April 2013 that EIKO controlled factories in Europe that gave Iran access to sensitive dual-use nuclear technology.
Sanctions relief for EIKO, and for all its previously sanctioned subsidiaries and officials, will also increase the supreme leader’s access to discretionary funds used to support terrorism and spread Iranian propaganda.
As my colleagues Eric Lorber and Matthew Zweig noted in 2019, the executive order under which EIKO is currently sanctioned (E.O. 13876) has nothing to do with nuclear issues. The order targets “actions of the Government of Iran and Iranian-backed proxies, particularly those taken to destabilize the Middle East, promote international terrorism, and advance Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Iran’s irresponsible and provocative actions in and over international waters, including the targeting of United States military assets and civilian vessels.”
Removing EIKO from the sanctions list on the pretext of nuclear détente follows no clear logic. At least in theory, the impending deal will impose meaningful restraints on Iran’s nuclear program, thus removing the need to sanction its components. But the deal will have no provision to restrain corruption or judicial abuse. On the contrary, EIKO will be able to act with impunity abroad much like it already does at home.
The new Iran deal will make EIKO—a lead culprit in the clerical regime’s corruption, plunder of state resources, human rights abuses, terrorism, and regional adventurism—much richer than ever before. This is Biden’s gift to the ayatollahs. It is the price of negotiations built around the hope that Tehran will be grateful for Biden’s commitment to diplomacy rather than eager to exploit it to the hilt.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan research institute in Washington DC focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @eottolenghi.
18. FDD | Team Biden Runs the Syria Playbook on Ukraine
Ouch.
Conclusion:
Sure enough, the administration has weaponized moral outrage over “Putin” in a messaging campaign against the Gulf Arab states and Israel. How can these countries be real U.S. allies when they don’t denounce “Putin”? While it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Gulf Arab states side with the authoritarian “Putin,” underscoring their incompatibility with American values, how can Israel call itself a democracy while it enables “Putin”? Like “the Palestinians” and “settlements,” “Putin” is a cudgel masquerading as a principled American stand on values that is meant to keep a downgraded Israel preoccupied and on the defensive as the administration gives nuclear weapons capacity to its enemy. If, with its faux outrage over “Putin,” the Obama-Biden crew manages to trip the Israelis into crossing a line with the actual Vladimir Putin, whom Obama helped install on Israel’s northern border, thereby complicating Israel’s ability to operate against Iran, then all the better.
That is to say, the administration’s moral outrage really isn’t about Ukraine at all. It’s another tool in the service of its deal with Iran. Which is the common thread between the timing of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, and the U.S. reaction to it. It’s all pegged to the realignment. That’s the lesson of the Syria playbook.
FDD | Team Biden Runs the Syria Playbook on Ukraine
The administration’s horror over Putin’s war is not merely performative, but functional—in the service of realigning with Iran
fdd.org · by Tony Badran Research Fellow · March 16, 2022
The Obama administration alumni now in charge of the Biden administration currently pose as staunch defenders of NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance against Russia’s barbaric aggression in Ukraine. But in 2012 and 2013, it was NATO’s other members who pressed Obama to join, and lead, the European and regional states opposed to Assad’s butchery in Syria. Instead, Obama fended them off by turning to Russia, and using its veto power-by-proxy at the United Nations and other international forums in which the administration claimed to place stock. Anyone who wants something in Syria, the Obama administration told U.S. allies, should go talk to Putin.
In August 2012, Obama made the blunder that he has since repeatedly said he regrets most of all out of every decision he made as president, when he boxed himself in by laying down a red line against Assad’s use of chemical weapons—a line Assad would cross repeatedly, all the way to a major chemical attack in August of 2013. Again, Obama turned to Russia to bail him out of a commitment he had no intention of keeping, as the rest of his presidency demonstrated quite clearly. At the time, Obama was on the verge of clinching the interim agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Plan of Action, which was signed in November 2013. There was no chance he would jeopardize that breakthrough by targeting Iran’s client in Damascus. He had now signaled that, for all the moralizing rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained his principal partner in the Syrian arena.
That Putin fully understood Russia’s importance in Obama’s Iran calculus could be seen by the fact that the Russian dictator immediately pressed his advantage by seeking compensation in Ukraine. In early 2014, he took the first small bite of the sovereign nation, invading and annexing Crimea. The United States’ reaction was rich in rhetorical condemnation and otherwise pointedly feeble. Aside from a profound historical critique from then-Secretary of State John Kerry about how “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion,” which must have sounded like a compliment in Moscow, the administration leveled some sanctions against individual Russians, froze the assets of a handful of Russian government officials in the United States, and canceled their visas—in other words, the kind of response that makes for palatable headlines, but has precisely zero effect on the calculations of Vladimir Putin.
Putin would continue ingesting additional amuse-bouches extracted from eastern Ukraine in return for his services in Syria well into 2015. But the main dish would be served to him later that year. As Obama drew closer to finalizing his deal with Iran, he was faced with a problem: His prospective Iranian ally and future candidate for Middle Eastern hegemony simply couldn’t get things under control in Syria. Assad and the Iranians were being bled badly, and were in danger of actually losing the war.
But first things first: In June 2015, Obama officially got his deal with Iran. Now it was time to protect what Obama called Iran’s “equity” in Syria. The following month, the commander of the Iranian forces, the late Qassem Soleimani, went to Moscow for help. At some point in 2015, an Assad go-between and Obama’s regional point man, Robert Malley (who is currently in charge of the Biden administration’s talks with Iran in Vienna), informed the White House that the Russians were preparing to intervene directly in Syria. And in September 2015, shortly after the Iran deal was done, the Russian military went into Syria.
Putin was now the protector of the equity Obama promised the Iranians. Moreover, in addition to safeguarding its base on the Black Sea, Russia was gifted with a long-sought strategic asset: a base on the Mediterranean, directly on NATO’s southern flank, and on the border with Israel.
Team Obama sought to cover its acquiescence to—indeed, its satisfaction with—Russia’s intervention by initially presenting it as a stupid decision on Putin’s part, which Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted would result in a quagmire for Russia. But that was just more “strategic messaging.” In no time, the Obama administration was coordinating with the Russians as they bombed opposition-held areas to dust in order to help Assad crush his enemies and win his war. Simultaneously, in one of the more grotesque examples of the Syria playbook, Samantha Power performed arabesques of moral outrage at the U.N., “shaming” the Russians for doing exactly what Obama had contracted with them to do, in support of the Iran deal.
Obama’s realignment policy took a hit in the Trump years, during which the United States withdrew from the Iran deal and facilitated the transition of the much-admired Soleimani back to the spirit world. But once Team Obama was back in power in the form of the Biden administration, Iran was back at the front of the line. Not coincidentally, so was Ukraine—the currency in which Iran’s Russian protector liked to be paid.
The Biden administration came into office with immediate gifts to both Iran and Russia. It removed sanctions on Iranian clients and stopped enforcing sanctions on Iranian oil exports. It also waived sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Putin’s dependence on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was Kyiv’s insurance policy against a further invasion. Russia needed that infrastructure to move gas to Europe, and Moscow couldn’t risk it being damaged or sabotaged. The purpose of Nord Stream 2 was to give Russia an alternative route, one that kept the same amount of gas flowing to Europe but eliminated its dependence on Ukraine. Once the pipeline was physically completed, Putin concluded that it was a fait accompli that the Europeans would eventually activate it, now that Biden had given it the green light.
As the talks with Iran entered their final stage, Putin began his preparations to move on Ukraine. No more amuse-bouches. Now it was time to Syrianize Ukraine—to consume it whole, as Russia’s main course at the Iran deal banquet.
Underneath all the anti-Putin rhetoric, and even the slew of sanctions that followed the Russian dictator’s invasion (which have increased only somewhat in severity as the fighting has dragged on), the posture of the Biden administration toward the Russian military operation has remained more or less the same—sanctions, sure, but nothing that puts friendly countries in an awkward spot, let alone starts World War III by giving the Ukrainians too many weapons, a policy that recalls Obama’s posture toward Moscow in Syria.
Putin is a thug, yes. But it takes a thug to ruthlessly pound ISIS and keep the Israeli Air Force grounded.
Looking back at the Syria playbook tells us that the denunciations of and half-measures to combat Putin’s aggression, combined with the solicitation of Russian aid and guarantees for Iran, is par for the course for the Obama-Biden realignment dance. And once the cynical two-step of this dance is seen for what it is, the moves are easy to spot. Even as the administration was slapping sanctions on Russia, it was simultaneously setting up a sanctions evasion haven for Putin in Iran, as it prepared to lift sanctions on Russia’s Iranian client.
How does that work? The Russians are the guarantors of the Iran deal. Moscow would receive Iran’s excess enriched uranium and exchange it for natural uranium. Per the deal, it would also be involved in nuclear and scientific cooperation projects with the Iranians. Naturally, the administration said it was “weighing” sanctions on Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear power supplier and uranium producer. Only it knows it won’t sanction Rosatom, because the Iran deal is more important. “We would of course not sanction Russian participation in nuclear projects that are part of resuming full implementation of the JCPOA,” a State Department official soon clarified. Rosatom reportedly has a $10 billion contract to expand Tehran’s Bushehr nuclear plant.
This is to say nothing about the prospects of selling arms to the Iranians once the Biden administration decides to revoke, or just not enforce, a Trump-era executive order that blocked arms sales to Tehran. Obama’s 2015 deal allowed arms sales after October 2020, and locked it into a Security Council resolution. The Trump administration invoked a snapback mechanism to reverse the U.N. resolution, and locked that in with the executive order. As part of what it calls a “rapid return to mutual compliance” with the deal, the Biden administration will want to permit such sales as quickly as possible. As Iran’s main arms supplier, the Russians will be allowed—even required—to sell arms to Iran, in order to fulfill the terms of the deal. And so it goes.
Moscow, already familiar with the Syria playbook and no doubt fed up with having to play the administration’s sanctions games while its soldiers are dying in Ukraine, decided to make a point of exposing the administration’s double-game publicly for all to see. At the 11th hour, as the Biden team got ready to announce the conclusion of the deal with Iran, the Russians threw a wrench in the works. They demanded the United States announce written guarantees that its sanctions on Russia will not impede “our right to free and full trade, economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with the Islamic Republic.” In a line that deserves a place in the annals of Soviet humor, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added, “We need guarantees that these sanctions won’t affect the regime of trade-economic and investment ties embedded in the [nuclear deal].”
Ridiculous, right? But it only took a few days before the Russians declared they were satisfied with the written guarantees they received from the Biden administration. That is to say, they’ve made their point, and everyone understood it.
As was the case in Syria, all the moral outrage about the horrors of Russia bombing civilian neighborhoods is just the lead in to the Iran deal. The American horror at Putin’s aggression, in other words, is not merely performative, but functional—all the more so after the instrumentalization of Vladimir Putin in domestic American politics since 2016.
For the Biden administration, unlike for Obama, there are necessarily two Putins. There’s Vladimir Putin, the realist head of state. He’s a stone-cold killer, to be sure, but he gets the job done in rough spots like Syria, where he helped keep America out of another Middle Eastern war while holding in check the U.S. allies and their domestic neocon lobbyists who wanted to drag us into that conflict and spoil the Iran deal. He’s a thug, yes. But it takes a thug to ruthlessly pound Islamist terrorists like ISIS and keep the Israeli Air Force grounded.
Then there’s “Putin,” the devious monster who hacked our elections to install a puppet in the White House in an all-out assault on American democracy that even some Republicans deplore. Clearly, no compromise is possible with that kind of hell spawn. But if Putin was instrumental in neutralizing pesky U.S. allies of old with his entry into Syria while Obama conducted the real business with Iran, “Putin” is equally useful toward the same end: browbeating U.S. allies put in danger by the Iran realignment into keeping their mouths shut while the 2.0 deal is sealed.
Sure enough, the administration has weaponized moral outrage over “Putin” in a messaging campaign against the Gulf Arab states and Israel. How can these countries be real U.S. allies when they don’t denounce “Putin”? While it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Gulf Arab states side with the authoritarian “Putin,” underscoring their incompatibility with American values, how can Israel call itself a democracy while it enables “Putin”? Like “the Palestinians” and “settlements,” “Putin” is a cudgel masquerading as a principled American stand on values that is meant to keep a downgraded Israel preoccupied and on the defensive as the administration gives nuclear weapons capacity to its enemy. If, with its faux outrage over “Putin,” the Obama-Biden crew manages to trip the Israelis into crossing a line with the actual Vladimir Putin, whom Obama helped install on Israel’s northern border, thereby complicating Israel’s ability to operate against Iran, then all the better.
That is to say, the administration’s moral outrage really isn’t about Ukraine at all. It’s another tool in the service of its deal with Iran. Which is the common thread between the timing of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, and the U.S. reaction to it. It’s all pegged to the realignment. That’s the lesson of the Syria playbook.
Tony Badran is Tablet magazine’s Levant analyst and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Tony Badran Research Fellow · March 16, 2022
19. Ukraine War Update - March 18, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine War Update - March 18, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO.
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Russian Campaign Update. The Russian offensive has, for the most part, taken a temporary break. One cause for this appears to be constant counterattacks that keep the Russians off balance and the interdiction of resupply lines that interrupt the flow of fuel, food, and ammunition. There were small advances attempted in a few locations.
Belarus. The Russians used the country to the north of Ukraine as a staging area for the invasion forces. It continues to transit supplies and personnel south across the Belarus border. Air strikes and missile launches are coming from Belarus as well. The Russian dead and wounded are moved north into Belarus and then on to Russia. Belarus troops have not yet joined the fight. There are concerns that Russian and / or Belarus units in Brest (southwest Belarus) could strike south across the border to interdict the east – west supply lines of communications (train and vehicle) in western Ukraine.
Fight for the Skies. The Russians have launched over 1,000 missiles into Ukraine – most from Russia and some from within Ukraine air space. The Russians have still not attained air superiority. The Ukrainians continue to press for a no-fly zone and for fighter jets. They are receiving record numbers of shoulder-fired ground to air missiles that are effective up to 11,000 feet.
S-300. The Ukrainians are hopeful that some more sophisticated weapons like the S-300 air defense system (see photo above) will be provided by some East European nations (Slovakia?). Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Slovakia on Thursday (Mar 17) and Slovakia’s S-300s was a topic of conversation. Slovakia will pass its S-300s to Ukraine if they are backfilled with air defense weapons from the United States.
No Fly Zone. During his speech to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday (Mar 16) the Ukrainian president made a plea for NATO to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Administration officials cite the dangers of starting a larger war, one with an adversary with nuclear weapons, as the main reason for not establishing a no-fly zone. Raphael S. Cohen argues that we shouldn’t rule it out completely in “Why It Could be a Strategic Mistake to Rule Out a No-Fly Zone Policy”, RAND Corporation, March 16, 2022.
Deadly Ukraine Skies. The Russian Air Force (VKS) is simply never meant to fight the way Western air forces do. It isn’t just the Stinger, Igla, and other air defense weapons systems that threaten Russian pilots. A dangerous combination of doctrine, training, and equipment are also partly to blame for the heavy losses of the VKS. Many of the Russian air support strikes for its ground troops are conducted at low levels – leaving them exposed to the numerous MANPADs available to the Ukraine military. There are other factors at play – one is the ‘supportive role’ of the VKS in a military campaign – it isn’t designed to attain ‘air supremacy’. Another factor is the type of bombs the Russians have – they have more ‘dumb’ bombs than ‘smart’ bombs. This means they have to fly at lower altitudes for accuracy and they can’t launch many standoff weapons due to a lack of targeting pods. “Why the skies over Ukraine have proven so deadly for Russian pilots”, by David Roza, Task & Purpose, March 17, 2022.
Maritime Activities. An amphibious landing force on several ships is still positioned in the Black Sea off the coast of Odessa. There is the possibility of a future landing of a substantial element of Russian naval infantry. The Russian blockade of Ukrainian shipping continues.
Ukrainian Defense (and Offense). Ukraine officials say that over 320,000 Ukrainians have returned to their home country. Most of them are men. The Ukrainian military launched a number of counteroffensives against Russian positions in the vicinity of Kyiv – principally in the suburbs of Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel. A Ukrainian offensive is also taking place in the vicinity of Kherson – currently held by the Russians.
Missile Strikes on Lviv. A location near the Lviv International Airport has been bombed. Reports say several Russian cruise missiles struck a nearby aircraft repair facility in the western city of Lviv on Friday morning (Mar 18). Some reports say there were 6 cruise missiles launched from the Black Sea.
Kyiv. The capital city of Ukraine is considered the primary objective of the Russians. The Capture of Kyiv would allow Russia to put in place its puppet government. Other than some shelling, the city itself is not under attack. Lines of communication with the rest of the country are still intact from the southerly direction. The main avenue of attack on Kyiv remains from the north and northwest – one that is about 15 kilometers from the city center. The attack from the east is stalled and is about 30 kilometers from the city center. To the east the major town of Brovary remains in Ukrainian hands.
Kharkiv. The second largest city of Ukraine is Kharkiv located in the northeast of the country. It is constantly under artillery, rocket, and missile attack. The Ukrainian forces continue to hold the city. Many believe the Russians are trying to demoralize the city’s inhabitants with the indiscriminate shelling on residential areas.
Mariupol. Located on the Sea of Azov, the coastal city of Mariupol is under siege by the Russians. This city is situated along the coastal road network that would provide Russia with a land bridge between Russia and the Crimea. The Russians struck a theater where hundreds of women and children were seeking shelter. Authorities say that 130 survivors have been recovered from the wreckage and that recovery efforts are continuing. Some reports say that between 500 to 1,000 people had been sheltered in the theater. The city is encircled and has been cut off from electricity, water, gas, mobile networks, food, and medical supplies. It is being shelled every day. Up to 80 per cent of the residential buildings have been destroyed.
Mykolayiv. Located on the west bank of the Dnieper River close to the coast of the Black Sea, Mykolayiv is a strategic objective for the Russians that is on the road to Odessa located further west along the coast of the Black Sea.
Biden and China. President Biden is expected to speak with President Xi on Friday (Mar 18). The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the message from Biden is that China should not support Russia. The conversation will also touch on competition between the two countries as well as other issues of mutual concern. Putin’s war in Ukraine has negative and positive consequences for the rulers in Beijing. “Beijing’s goals and Putin’s war are meshing in nasty ways”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Initiative (ASPI), March 18, 2022.
Switchblade Drones. A drone recently developed by the United States and used by U.S. special operations forces is being sent to Ukraine. One hundred of the Switchblade drones are being sent, with the possibility of more in the future. Costing about $6,000 a piece, they are able to be carried in a backpack and flown by an operator to its target. The drone comes with a warhead and used by crashing into the target.
Super Yachts. A number of big yachts owned by rich Russians are being seized around the world. The most recent one is a 443-foot yacht worth $600 million taken by Spain. It is part of a crackdown on oligarchs that support Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
Insurgency Scenarios. Prior to the February 24th invasion there was a lot of speculation on how the conflict would end. Most national security observers noted that the Russians would score a quick win, seizing most or all of Ukraine. Some went on to describe different types of insurgencies that might take place in the aftermath of the war. Emily Harding is one who analyzed ‘the future’. Read her thoughts on the topic in “Scenario Analysis on a Ukrainian Insurgency”, Center for Strategic & International Studies, February 15, 2022.
IO – a Decisive Role. Russian has locked down access to almost all social media platforms, to include Facebook and Twitter. It has also blocked access to news media like Radio Free Europe and some independent Russian news services. It has passed laws that criminalize the spreading of “fake news” with up to 15 years in prison. However, Ukraine and the west can fight back in the information operations arena. “Keeping Russians Informed about Ukraine Could Help End This War”, The RAND Blog, March 14, 2022.
Humanitarian Effort in Ukraine. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, United Nations agencies and other international organizations had a limited presence in the country. There were about 34 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and nine UN agencies in the country prior to February 24th, most of them in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Now they are busy establishing and scaling up humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. Learn how the NGOs and UN agencies are regrouping and now providing assistance. “In Ukraine, building an emergency aid response (almost) from scratch“, The New Humanitarian, March 17, 2022.
Refugees. As of March 18, over 3,000,000 refugees have left Ukraine according to data provided by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has published its March 17 Situation Report (PDF, 9 pages).
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, defense, or the current conflict in Ukraine then we are interested.
Maps and Other Resources
UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one
Maps of Ukraine
Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.
UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation
Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.
Janes Equipment Profile – Ukraine Conflict. An 81-page PDF provides information on the military equipment of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces. Covers naval, air, electronic warfare, C4ISR, communications, night vision, radar, and armored fighting vehicles, Ukraine Conflict Equipment Profile, February 28, 2022.
Arms Transfers to Ukraine. Forum on the Arms Trade.
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20. The war in Ukraine will determine how China sees the world
Excerpts:
Rather than also push China “outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours”—as Richard Nixon wrote years before his famous trip to Beijing five decades ago—America and its allies should show that they see the rising superpower differently. The aim should be to persuade Mr Xi that the West and China can thrive by agreeing where possible and agreeing to differ where not. That requires working out where engagement helps and where it threatens national security.
Might China yet start down this path by helping bring the war in Ukraine to a swift end? Alas, barring the Russian use of chemical or nuclear weapons, that looks unlikely—for China sees Russia as a partner in dismantling the liberal world order. Diplomatic pleading will influence Chinese calculations less than Western resolve to make Mr Putin pay for his crimes. ■
The war in Ukraine will determine how China sees the world
And how threatening it becomes
Mar 19th 2022
EACH DAY brings new horrors to Ukraine, where Russian artillery fire echoes like thunder across cities and towns. The metropolis of Kharkiv lies in ruins, victim of two weeks of bombardment. Mariupol, on the coast, has been destroyed.
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It is too soon to know if a winner will emerge from the fighting. But, on the other side of the planet, the world’s emerging superpower is weighing its options. Some argue that China will build on a pre-war friendship with Russia that knows “no limits”, to create an axis of autocracy. Others counter that America can shame China into breaking with Russia, isolating Vladimir Putin, its president. Our reporting suggests that neither scenario is likely. The deepening of ties with Russia will be guided by cautious self-interest, as China exploits the war in Ukraine to hasten what it sees as America’s inevitable decline. The focus at all times is its own dream of establishing an alternative to the Western, liberal world order.
Both China’s president, Xi Jinping, and Mr Putin want to carve up the world into spheres of influence dominated by a few big countries. China would run East Asia, Russia would have a veto over European security and America would be forced back home. This alternative order would not feature universal values or human rights, which Mr Xi and Mr Putin see as a trick to justify Western subversion of their regimes. They appear to reckon that such ideas will soon be relics of a liberal system that is racist and unstable, replaced by hierarchies in which each country knows its place within the overall balance of power.
Hence Mr Xi would like Russia’s invasion to show up the West’s impotence. If the sanctions on Russia’s financial system and high-tech industry fail, China will have less to fear from such weapons. If Mr Putin lost power because of his miscalculation in Ukraine, it could shock China. It would certainly embarrass Mr Xi, who would be seen to have miscalculated too, by allying with him—a setback when he is seeking a third term as Communist Party leader, violating recent norms.
For all that, however, Chinese support has its limits. The Russian market is small. Chinese banks and companies do not want to risk losing much more valuable business elsewhere by flouting sanctions. A weak Russia suits China because it would have little choice but to be pliant. Mr Putin would be more likely to give Mr Xi access to northerly Russian ports, to accommodate China’s growing interests in, say, Central Asia, and to supply it with cheap oil and gas and sensitive military technology, including perhaps the designs for advanced nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, Mr Xi seems to believe that Mr Putin does not need to win a crushing victory for China to come out ahead: survival will do. Chinese officials confidently tell foreign diplomats that Western unity over Russia will splinter as the war drags on, and as costs to Western voters mount. China is already trying to prise apart Europe and America, claiming that the United States is propping up its power while getting Europeans to foot the bill for high energy prices, larger armies and the burden of hosting over 3m Ukrainian refugees.
China’s approach to the Russo-Ukraine war is born out of Mr Xi’s conviction that the great contest in the 21st century will be between China and America—one he likes to suggest that China is destined to win. For China, what happens in Ukraine’s shelled cities is a skirmish in this contest. It follows that the success of the West in dealing with Mr Putin will help determine China’s view of the world—and how it later has to deal with Mr Xi.
The first task is for NATO to defy Chinese predictions by sticking together. As the weeks turn into months that may become hard. Imagine that the fighting in Ukraine settles into a grim pattern of urban warfare, in which neither side is clearly winning. Peace talks could lead to ceasefires that break down. Suppose that winter draws near and energy prices remain high. Ukraine’s example early in the war inspired support across Europe that stiffened governments’ sinews. The time may come when political leaders will have to find the resolve within themselves.
Willpower can be linked to reform. Having defended democracy, Western countries need to reinforce it. Germany has decided to deal with Russia by confronting it, not trading with it. The European Union will need to corral its Russia sympathisers, including Italy and Hungary. The British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, a group of ten northern European countries, is evolving into a first responder to Russian aggression. In Asia, America can work with its allies to improve defences and plan for contingencies, many of which will involve China. The joined-up action that shocked Russia should not come as a surprise to China if it invaded Taiwan.
And the West needs to exploit the big difference between China and Russia. Three decades ago their two economies were the same size; now China’s is ten times larger than Russia’s. For all Mr Xi’s frustration, China has thrived under today’s order, whereas Russia has only undermined it. Obviously, Mr Xi wants to revise the rules to serve his own interests better, but he is not like Mr Putin, who has no other way of exerting Russian influence than disruptive threats and the force of arms. Russia under Mr Putin is a pariah. Given its economic ties to America and Europe, China has a stake in stability.
Shanghai on the Dnieper
Rather than also push China “outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours”—as Richard Nixon wrote years before his famous trip to Beijing five decades ago—America and its allies should show that they see the rising superpower differently. The aim should be to persuade Mr Xi that the West and China can thrive by agreeing where possible and agreeing to differ where not. That requires working out where engagement helps and where it threatens national security.
Might China yet start down this path by helping bring the war in Ukraine to a swift end? Alas, barring the Russian use of chemical or nuclear weapons, that looks unlikely—for China sees Russia as a partner in dismantling the liberal world order. Diplomatic pleading will influence Chinese calculations less than Western resolve to make Mr Putin pay for his crimes. ■
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The alternative world order"
21. Arnold Schwarzenegger urges Russians to overcome government disinformation
I think this is good. I hope it was translated into Russian. And it is interesting that Schwarnegger is one of only 22 people Putin follows on twitter.
This is crowd sourcing PSYOP among the people and celebrities.
Arnold Schwarzenegger urges Russians to overcome government disinformation
CNN · by Travis Caldwell, CNN
(CNN)Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made an impassioned appeal to the Russian people in a video posted on social media, asking them to resist their country's disinformation as the devastating invasion of Ukraine continues.
Schwarzenegger said he was "sending this message through various different channels" for Russian citizens and soldiers, and hoped his message about the atrocities committed by its government and military would break through. The video posted on Twitter has more than 15 million views.
"Ukraine did not start this war. Neither did nationalists or Nazis," he said. "Those in power in the Kremlin started this war."
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) March 17, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin and government officials have made false accusations toward Ukraine as their motivations for the invasion, baselessly saying the country must "deNazify."
"There are things that are going on in the world that are being kept from you, terrible things that you should know about," Schwarzenegger said.
Read More
"I know the Russian people are not aware such things are happening, so I urge the Russian people and the Russian soldiers in Ukraine to understand the propaganda and the disinformation that you are being told. I ask you to help me spread the truth."
He heavily criticized the Russian government for the invasion, saying they "lied not only to its citizens but to its soldiers" for the reasons behind the war.
Schwarzenegger also spoke fondly of his experiences visiting Russia during his movie career and said his childhood hero was Russian heavyweight weightlifter and Olympic gold medalist Yuri Vlasov. Schwarzenegger said he was 14 years old when he met Vlasov for the first time. His idol's kindness inspired a young Schwarzenegger to keep a photo of him above his bed despite the objections of his father, an Austrian who fought for Nazi Germany during WWII.
Schwarzenegger included a message for Russians protesting publicly against the war at great risk to personal liberty.
"The world has seen your bravery. We know that you have suffered the consequences of your courage," he said.
"You are my new heroes. You have the strength of Yuri Petrovich Vlasov. You have the true heart of Russia."
CNN · by Travis Caldwell, CNN
22. 'Can One Man Save the World' song about Zelensky takes internet by storm
Another example of corwdsourcing PSYOP.
'Can One Man Save the World' song about Zelensky takes internet by storm
Newsweek · by Jamie Burton · March 16, 2022
An emotional song dedicated to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is causing a huge reaction online as the singer John Ondrasik asks, "Can One Man Save the World?"
Often known by his stage name, Five for Fighting, Ondrasik has released his new single dedicated to Zelensky and the music video has already been viewed online hundreds of thousands of times.
Ondrasik admits he wrote and released the song "Can One Man Save the World?" over the past weekend. It features lyrics referring to Zelensky as a "Superman Ukrainian" and having "an Eastern heart the West has lost."
It's caused an emotional reaction online. Thousands of comments have applauded Ondrasik for his song and lyrics about the Ukrainian president standing brave against the Russian invasion.
The song "Can One Man Save the World?" is bringing tears to the eyes of some that listen to it. Replying to Ondrasik's tweet where he showcased the song, @LindaAuteuil wrote to the singer, "Your song had me in tears. I wish America had a hero here to look up to, but we definitely have a hero in Ukraine."
Twitter user @fibrogirl96 claimed to have tears coming down her cheeks after listening.
Ondrasik is even receiving praise from celebrities, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak retweeting the song and writing to the singer on Twitter, "Great lyrics when you want to sing along and feel it."
Glenn Beck also retweeted the track and answered the question posed in the song. He wrote, "The answer is YES! When one man stands when all odds are against him, other men find their courage and begin to stand."
Great lyrics when you want to sing along and feel it.
— Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz) March 14, 2022
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) March 14, 2022
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) March 15, 2022
The comments in support for Ondrasik's song are flooding in on YouTube and Facebook too, with thousands of people taking the time to thank him for the new track.
On Facebook, Ondrasik, under the banner of Five for Fighting, thanked everyone for "sharing this song and standing w Zelensky and the Ukrainian people."
Ondrasik appeared on Fox and Friends to promote his new single and during his interview he called Zelensky a "modern day Churchill."
Ukraine War: Russian Prisoners of War Give Vladimir Putin Ultimatum
Read more
He continued: "Every night I pray that I wake up and he hasn't been assassinated and with every speech you wonder, is this going to be his last one? So we can't watch from the sidelines, we have to support this man."
"I think we've been longing for someone to stand up and remind us who we are in the West, who would have thought it would be a comedian from Ukraine, but he's doing it," Ondrasik said.
Five for Fighting's most famous track is "Superman (It's Not Easy)" which was released in 2001 and nominated for a Grammy Award.
As well as Ondrasik's social media channels, the single "Can One Man Save the World?" is also now available to listen to on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music.
Grammy nominated artist John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting (pictured left in 2017) has written the song "Can One Man Save the World?" about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (right). Paul Morigi / Le Monde/Getty Images
Newsweek · by Jamie Burton · March 16, 2022
23. Yes, Ukraine Could Beat Russia
Wise conclusion from Professor Holmes:
Commentators on the Russo-Ukraine war have been quick to make sport of Russian arms or to despair of Ukraine’s chances of survival against the Russian juggernaut. Clausewitz, Washington, and Mao would mock such premature, ahistorical verdicts on the conflict. In all likelihood, the coming weeks will witness ups and downs for both belligerents.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
Yes, Ukraine Could Beat Russia
Which antagonist—if either—will prevail in Ukraine?
The longevity and success of Russia’s offensive is a hot topic of debate among foreign-policy practitioners and the commentariat. Nor is it an idle topic. But beware of too-confident assessments. Canvassing military history indicates that campaigns tend to sputter over time. A campaign may stagnate, and reversals of fortune are far from rare. It takes not just a proficient military machine but leadership possessed of ingenuity and force of character to keep the momentum going, or regain it if it slips way.
So Russia isn’t predestined to be the victor over Ukraine even though it’s the stronger combatant—by far—by the numbers. Indeed, the Russian offensive has shown signs of faltering since day one. A lesser combatant that makes maximum use of its latent combat power can stymie an opponent that wastes its potential.
Martial sage Carl von Clausewitz explains the rhythms of the battlefield in somewhat mystical terms, showing how military success relates to and helps bring about political success. The central idea he puts forward is the “culminating point,” the point at which the fortunes of war start to change for one or both combatants, sometimes in drastic ways. One antagonist’s relative strength may top out while the other’s bottoms out and starts to rebound. Or they may come to a crossover point beyond which the erstwhile stronger competitor is now the weaker.
First, there’s the “culminating point of victory.” Clausewitz posits that the attacker amasses initial supremacy in the military balance by virtue of surprise, the initiative, the prerogative to choose the initial point of impact, and so forth. At the same time, though, Clausewitz believes tactical defense is the strongest form of warfare. That being the case, he prophesies that the attacker’s military advantage will crest and start to dwindle over time. But because political advantage—bargaining leverage that goes to the likely victor—starts to ebb away after the culminating point, so does the attacker’s ability to impose its will on the defender.
Call it the Clausewitzian paradox. The attacker generally has to press its offensive beyond the culminating point of victory—its maximum margin of military superiority—to seize what it wants. But it’s in a weaker and weaker position as the offensive goes on. It takes masterful generalship to sustain the battlefield advantage long enough to pluck the fruits of war.
Politically speaking, Russia may already have culminated. Its failure to score the lightning triumph craved by President Vladimir Putin has stained Russia’s reputation for martial prowess. Fewer foreign leaders will fear Moscow’s threats in the future, or seek out support from what seems like an untrustworthy ally. Repute is everything in power politics, and Russia has damaged its brand.
Through its unprovoked assault, moreover, Russia stands revealed as a foe of small sovereign states everywhere, and as an unworthy steward of the U.N.-led world order put in place at San Francisco in 1945. It has outdone China for lawlessness, which is saying something nowadays. Russian arms may yet prevail in Ukraine by brute force. But Russia’s political standing has suffered—making lasting political gains elusive.
The defender also gets a vote on when the attacker’s fortunes culminate. It is possible that Russia overshot its culminating point of victory very early in the campaign, with an assist from an ornery home team. To its credit, the Ukrainian Army has refused to fight Russia’s fight. Rather than risk a conventional toe-to-toe engagement in which they might lose everything, Ukrainian commanders have resorted to irregular warfare—a strategy whereby the weak deliberately prolong the endeavor to sap the physical might and willpower of the strong. The longer the fighting drags on, the more intense the international opprobrium and, potentially, the greater the resistance to the war among Russians back home.
Some form of compromise peace might eventually result.
The defender’s allies and partners can also help nudge the aggressor past its culminating point of victory. International sanctions can degrade the aggressor’s stocks of warmaking materiel over time. Running in weaponry to arm the defender—especially antitank armaments in the Ukrainian Army’s case—helps even the balance of forces in a more direct way. Russia’s margin of martial superiority will wither in part, and with it Moscow’s capacity to win a convincing triumph in reasonably short order. Alliance management is crucial to Ukraine’s prospects.
The second type of culminating point Clausewitz espies is the “culminating point of the attack.” If the attacker surges beyond its culminating point of victory and keeps going too far, its margin of superiority will diminish by the day. Ultimately it will narrow to zero—and the attacker will find itself the weaker contestant, probably deep within hostile territory. If bargaining power flows from superiority on the battlefield, the erstwhile attacker will lose its ability to wrest away a favorable peace.
Now, It’s doubtful Russia will overshoot its culminating point of the attack in light of the massive resource disparity between the combatants. But it’s not impossible. George Washington’s Continental Army confronted such a mismatch during the early years of the War of American Independence, and yet the irregular approach coupled with deft alliance politics let the American colonists prevail after a lengthy struggle. Mao Zedong’s Red Army came back from its Long March, when Chinese Nationalist armies hunted the Chinese Communist Party almost to extinction. The odds are forbidding against Ukraine—but survival is a possibility.
So there’s a formula: spread out rather than mass forces, deny the aggressor a quick strategic victory, and court allies and friends able to influence the outcome. The ebb-and-flow dynamics of combat are what the strategist Edward Luttwak terms the “paradoxical” logic of warfare. Commanders’ tendency to overextend their forces sweeps the campaign past its culminating points; overstepping may bring on an “ironic” reversal of fortune. The victor may become the vanquished—or at least fall short of its political aims.
Commentators on the Russo-Ukraine war have been quick to make sport of Russian arms or to despair of Ukraine’s chances of survival against the Russian juggernaut. Clausewitz, Washington, and Mao would mock such premature, ahistorical verdicts on the conflict. In all likelihood, the coming weeks will witness ups and downs for both belligerents.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
A 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone.
24. A future defense triad: A new deterrence strategy for the 21st century
Although this touts unconventional options for deterrence there is no discussion of unconventional deterrence and the importance of resistance. I am disappointed but not surprised. And SOF is mentioned in two places - ICW CYBERCOM and influence operations (good) and that SOF is well suited for bio defense in the homeland( huh?) (Yes, I am exposing buy bias again).
A future defense triad: A new deterrence strategy for the 21st century
American Enterprise Institute
March 17, 2022
Key Points
- Globalization and radical advances in technology have generated novel threats against which current defense paradigms offer little protection. America teeters on a historic inflection point and can either confront these changes or court military catastrophe.
- The military is poised to sink hundreds of billions of dollars into recapitalizing the nuclear triad, which was a policy prescription of the Cold War and amounts to a modern-day Maginot Line.
- America needs a new defense triad, with legs corresponding to the greatest current defense challenges: biological threats, information warfare, and threats stemming from advanced munitions. I call this new triad “deterrence by denial.”
- A reallocation of resources is clearly needed to fund the defense triad’s priorities. Given limited resources, the old triad should be reduced to fund the new triad.
Executive Summary
In 2021 alone, the United States and its armed forces were humbled by cyberattacks, watched their overmatch at the cutting-edge of conventional weaponry erode regarding China, and were crippled by a pandemic. Together, these challenges have reinforced the mounting risks and destructive potential of hybrid attacks, offered individuals and rogue nations the capabilities of great-power nations, and, in short, corroded all forms of US deterrence up to and including the nuclear threshold. The United States boasts a world-class—yet aging—nuclear deterrent as the anchor of its national defense strategy, yet advancing technologies have left the US vulnerable to new existential threats.
This new and complex threat landscape offers global competitors a range of unconventional options that exploit gaps in traditional US conventional and nuclear deterrence capabilities.1 Among the most impactful of these new challenges are information warfare, advanced munitions, and biological agents, the destructive power of which stand to be increased by disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and advanced communication networks. Armed with such capabilities, US adversaries can impose dilemmas for which neither the US armed forces nor policymakers are prepared.
However, rather than addressing these new threats, the US remains fixated on outdated deterrence models. Most obviously, the military is poised to sink hundreds of billions of dollars to recapitalize the nuclear triad. These are unevolved and unimaginative Cold War policy prescriptions, and they amount to a modern-day Maginot Line. As we enter the 2020s— an era of unprecedented interconnectedness and dynamic threats—policymakers must consider the threats the US will likely face, before investing a trillion dollars into static defense frameworks that will lull Americans into a false sense of security.2
Accordingly, this report proposes another way forward for US defense investments and priorities.
A new defense triad—composed of information, advanced kinetic, and biological legs—offers America and the Department of Defense (DOD) the tools required to fill the gaps in the United States’ global security posture against these existential threats. This new defense triad will provide a stronger, more stable, and more proactive form of deterrence, ensuring the US will not be crippled by information warfare, novel weaponry, biological pandemics, or all the above.
This report is organized in two sections. The first section details the nature of the threats each new leg of the proposed future defense triad is intended to address: the rise of information operations by state actors and their impact on the United States, the acceleration of advanced munitions and their implications for the future battlefield, and COVID-19’s warning for how deeply unprepared the US is for a future biological assault. The second section of this report explains how the DOD can better prepare to meet each threat, including via department reorganization, technology investments, and the development or protection of certain skill sets and competencies within the US military.
An increased focus by the DOD on the emerging conventional and sub-conventional threats facing the US is necessary, but the funds to realize this focus will not materialize without a hard-nosed prioritization of resources. To execute this proposal for a new defense triad, this report does not recommend following the Pentagon’s traditional funding redistribution approach of “taking a little from here and a bit more from there.” Cutting conventional capacity to increase resources for the new triad is counterproductive. Instead, this report recommends making difficult strategic decisions and trade-offs between the DOD’s current nuclear triad modernization plans and this new triad. The recommendation to reduce funding to the current nuclear triad is not made lightly, especially given the recent Russian nuclear threats, but it is made in the context that defense spending has been and will continue to be constrained, and the money for the proposed triad has to come from somewhere.
The stakes are high, and the DOD cannot afford to remain beholden to outdated conceptualizations of threats and deterrence. Perhaps most importantly, this report identifies a range of actions the US military might take to address each type of challenge. Some of the recommendations from this analysis are more ambitious and transformative than others are, but inaction is unacceptable.
In sum, the existential threats the US will likely face over the coming decades live below the nuclear threshold, requiring capabilities and expertise that the DOD could further develop. Therefore, resources frozen into the nuclear triad could be reallocated to deter and withstand conventional and sub-conventional threats. However, reducing the nuclear triad is but one area in which the department can aggressively prioritize resources to achieve 21st-century deterrence if additional resources are not made available. Broadly, policymakers must recognize there are no sacred cows in the national defense strategy; priorities must be driven by evenhanded threat assessments rather than the inertia of Cold War deterrence frameworks.
Introduction
“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”3 These words compose the oath taken by all who are “elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services,” binding in service both the members of the armed services and the nation’s civil servants.4 Increasingly, however, civilian and military personnel lack the tools to achieve their sworn task. Globalization and radical advances in technology have generated novel threats against which current defense paradigms offer little protection. America teeters on a historic inflection point and can either confront these changes or court military catastrophe. As the Biden administration puts in place its national security and defense strategies, it must drive a thorough reimagining of US national security priorities and the tools with which to secure them.
International competitors have spent decades identifying American vulnerabilities and seeking ways to undermine America’s global deterrence strategies. US conventional military dominance, which proved so decisive in Operation Desert Storm, is no longer sufficient to deter American adversaries. As Chinese Cols. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the People’s Liberation Army note in their treatise Unrestricted Warfare, American conventional capabilities cannot maintain global peace; war has “re-invaded human society in a more complex, more extensive, more concealed, and more subtle manner.”5 This new complexity offers global competitors a range of unconventional options that can exploit gaps in traditional US conventional and nuclear deterrence capabilities.6 Among the most impactful of these new threats are information warfare, advanced munitions, and biological agents, each of which are being weaponized using disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and advanced communication networks. Armed with such capabilities, US adversaries can impose dilemmas for which neither the US armed forces nor policymakers are prepared.
However, rather than addressing these threats, the US remains fixated on outdated deterrence models. For instance, the military is poised to sink hundreds of billions of dollars to recapitalize the nuclear triad. These are Cold War policy prescriptions, and they amount to a modern-day Maginot Line. To understand US strategic priorities, all one needs to do is follow the money—and where resources are being funneled today speaks to a lack of imagination. As we enter the 2020s—an era of unprecedented interconnectedness and dynamic threats—policymakers must consider the threats the US will likely face, before investing a trillion dollars into static defenses that will lull Americans into a false sense of security.7
The United States has often faced—and overcome— novel threats. To succeed in today’s security environment, America must embrace new, more flexible capabilities to guarantee “the ability to counter aggression at whatever level of violence it occurred, but without unnecessary escalation.”8 To that end, America needs a new defense triad, with legs corresponding to today’s greatest defense challenges: biological threats, information warfare, and threats stemming from advanced munitions. The new defense triad is a call for fresh thinking, vaulting the nation and its security beyond archaic Cold War defense frameworks and using scarce resources to maximize US security in the 21st century.
Chapter 11 of The 9/11 Commission Report states, “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.”9 Today, we are staring at a similar precipice, struggling to comprehend how threats such as disinformation attacks, pandemics, and the rapidly advancing conventional capabilities of adversaries threaten the American way of life. As the Biden administration drafts its 2022 National Security and National Defense Strategies amid eroding American deterrence and unprecedented change, it must rapidly adjust its policies, capabilities, and resources to recognize these new threats. Only by creating a new defense triad can it focus the will and resources required to meet this decisive moment.
Notes
1. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing, China: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999), https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf.
2. Congressional Budget Office, “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2021 to 2030,” May 2021, 1, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-05/57130-Nuclear-Forces.pdf.
3. Oath of Office, 5 USC § 3331 (1966).
4. Oath of Office, 5 USC § 3331 (1966).
5. Liang and Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, 6.
6. Liang and Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare.
7. Congressional Budget Office, “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2021 to 2030.”
8. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 99.
9. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, July 2004, 339, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf.
25. 'Fed-up' Biden wants Xi Jinping to disavow Russia's Ukraine invasion
Oh to be a fly on the wall for this phone call today.
'Fed-up' Biden wants Xi Jinping to disavow Russia's Ukraine invasion
The Friday call between Biden and Xi is a high-stakes moment and an indication of U.S. leverage — or lack thereof — with China.
President Biden’s challenge will be to convey to Xi that improvement in bilateral relations hinges on him ending China’s spectator status to the conflict by cutting supply lines to Russia and pressuring Vladimir Putin to take steps to stop the fighting. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
03/18/2022 07:00 AM EDT
President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Friday morning to try and enlist China’s support in mitigating the worsening humanitarian crisis sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion.
The call — likely brokered in national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s one-on-one in Rome on Monday with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi — occurs amid intensifying verbal sparring over Beijing’s failure to condemn Russian aggression and parroting of Moscow’s invasion narrative.
Biden and Xi seeded a modicum of goodwill with a virtual meeting in November. But Washington has been angry with Beijing’s neutral position over Ukraine and has threatened punitive economic sanctions if China provides assistance requested by Putin.
The call is a potential watershed moment in the U.S.-China relationship.
It will test Biden’s ability to leverage his relationship with Xi to overcome Beijing’s position of passive complicity with Moscow and extract commitments that China instead pressure the Kremlin to seek an end to Russia’s slaughter in Ukraine.
“I think Jake Sullivan [in his meeting with Yang] laid out the negative consequences for China of any aid to Russia, so now it’s time for Biden to build on his personal relationship with Xi to emphasize the upside potential of cooperating at this critical moment in world history, to appeal to his statesman side, and suggest that this might be a really good way to get [bilateral] relations back on constructive footing,” said Susan Shirk, a China expert and former deputy assistant Secretary of State. “A realistic expectation is that Xi commits not to tangibly assist Russia in terms of evading financial sanctions and military aid.”
The U.S. and China have deadlocked over Beijing’s refusal to use its influence on Putin to curb the war in Ukraine. China is Russia’s largest trading partner: Bilateral trade soared 36 percent in 2021 to a record $147 billion and it has recently committed to massive purchases of Russian wheat and coal.
“We believe China in particular has a responsibility to use its influence with President Putin and to defend the international rules and principles that it professes to support,” Blinken said. “Instead, it appears that China is moving in the opposite direction by refusing to condemn this aggression while seeking to portray itself as a neutral arbiter — and we’re concerned that they are considering directly assisting Russia with military equipment to use in Ukraine.”
Diplomatic sources said that Blinken’s bluntness reflects impatience, not posturing.
“The Biden team is completely fed-up with Beijing [but] they don’t want to close the door to diplomacy in order to deliver a strong warning signal and to show allies, partners and ‘neutral’ countries that the U.S. is trying its best to persuade China till the last minute,” a D.C.-based diplomat told POLITICO. “If Beijing changes its course after the Biden-Xi call, it’s a good thing for the world. If not, it will be easier for the U.S. to ask other countries to join the U.S.-led pressure campaign against China.”
The Chinese government continues to mouth empty platitudes, rather than take action that might make Putin rethink his decision.
“On the Ukraine issue, China has been making positive efforts to deescalate the situation as we are committed to promoting peace talks and proposing our initiative to resolve the current crisis,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Thursday. Zhao spiked that line by adding that criticism of China’s position on the invasion was hypocritical and possibly racist.
The Biden administration has been incensed by indications that Russia has requested Beijing’s material assistance in the Ukraine war effort through provision of unspecified economic and military aid.
China has replied with defiance. “China is not a party directly involved in the crisis, and it doesn’t want to be affected by sanctions even more. China has the right to safeguard its legitimate and lawful rights and interests,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares Bueno on Monday.
Biden’s challenge will be to convey to Xi that improvement in bilateral relations hinges on him ending China’s spectator status to the conflict by cutting supply lines to Russia and pressuring Putin to take steps to stop the fighting.
“China is trying to straddle three competing policy priorities — its longstanding foreign policy commitment to sovereignty and territorial integrity; its interdependent if complicated relationships, including on trade, with Europe and the U.S.; and its newly vaunted partnership with Russia,” said Daniel Baer, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017 and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Biden can be direct and clear with the Chinese leader … first, and most importantly, that any substantial action by China to undermine the sanctions that the United States and its allies have put on Russia will have a negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship,” Baer added. “And second, that the U.S. will work with our partners and allies in the region and in Europe to internationalize any response to Chinese efforts to undermine the international community’s response to Russian aggression.”
Biden will be under intense GOP scrutiny to demonstrate that his meeting with Xi leads to perceptible change in Chinese messaging and policy, rather than vague assertions of bilateral consensus on cooperation, peace and humanitarian support for Ukraine.
“The President should seek a firm commitment that Xi will pressure Putin to bring a swift end to the invasion and that China will stop spouting Russian propaganda about biolabs and NATO responsibility,” said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) in a statement. “If Biden can get Xi to even call Russia’s illegal campaign an invasion, which is what it is, that would be a start.”
But China’s desire to stay neutral makes that a hard ask.
Beijing dropped diplomatic ambiguity about its position by promoting Russia’s narrative, saying that the U.S. was responsible for the crisis. It also announced trade support to help Russia withstand sanctions.
“I don’t know how much the U.S. can get out of China because China is not going to oppose or abandon Russia,” said Yun Sun, China program director at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “China has already made the determination that no matter how this war turns out, the U.S. will see China as a long-term enemy, so the logic for China is that helping the U.S. on Russia does China a disservice.”
On Capitol Hill, Republicans are determined that administration efforts to win China’s support in stymieing Putin’s war plans not come at the cost of any transactional diplomacy that undercuts U.S. support for Taiwan.
There are indications that China sees an opportunity to do precisely that. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s 669-word readout of the Sullivan-Yang meeting devoted only three words to “the Ukraine issue” but larded in 332 words outlining Chinese concerns about the U.S. position on Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.
“As Russia invades Ukraine, we know China is eyeing Taiwan, including reports of leaked Russian intelligence claiming Xi intended to invade Taiwan this fall. President Biden must be clear in promising a strong response if China helps Russia evade sanctions or moves aggressively on Taiwan.” Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) said in a statement. “The message should be that the U.S. will help our friends in need and not hesitate in imposing harsh consequences for aggression.”
Observers warn that any assurances Xi provides Biden regarding adjustments to China’s diplomatic, trade and military relationship with Russia are fraught with the potential for misinterpretation or outright mendacity.
“China will say: ‘We’re not providing economic assistance to Russia, we’re conducting trade with Russia in the normal way based on the agreements we signed before the invasion,’” said Sun. “The Chinese will also say [to the U.S.] that if you want to sanction Chinese energy companies for importing Russian energy, you will need to sanction your European allies as well.”
Despite those challenges, Friday’s meeting gives Biden an opportunity to directly convey to Xi the importance of China assisting the U.S. in opposing Putin’s aggression — and the risks that Xi runs if he fails to do so.
“As the world’s leading powers, the United States and China each have a responsibility to defend the foundations of the international order from Vladimir Putin’s attacks. Xi Jinping has a choice to make about whether he will stand up for the principles of sovereignty and peace or join Putin in tearing down those principles,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said in a statement.
“President Biden should make clear that Xi’s vision of a great national rejuvenation will be in peril if China were to divert from the global consensus and support Russia.”
26. Six cruise missiles fired at Lviv from submarine in Black Sea - West air command'
The reports I have seen said these were air launched cruise missiles. I have not seen any other reporting along the lines below from the Ukraine News Agency regarding submarine launched missiles.. I have seen multiple reports that two missiles were shot down.
09:27 18.03.2022
Six cruise missiles fired at Lviv from submarine in Black Sea - West air command'
1 min read
Six cruise missiles were fired at Lviv from a submarine located in the Black Sea, the West air command reports on its Facebook page.
"According to preliminary data, six cruise missiles, possibly X-555, were fired from a submarine in the Black Sea," the report says.
"Two missiles were destroyed in the air by the anti-aircraft missile forces of the West air command," the report says.
As reported, Russian missiles hit Lviv near the airport.
27. The Mystique of the Female Soldier: Portrayals of Ukrainian Women in Western Media
Conclusion:
It is important to critique the role of the media in war and geopolitics. After all, the way we talk about issues determines whether these issues are prioritized or securitized. The issue of gender remains de-securitized in much of the international affairs conversation. Women’s stories are still side-shows. We still live in a world where “Woman Defends her Country” makes a headline.
Worldwide coverage of women in the Ukraine crisis follows a narrow genre. “Women in the war” reporting is generally seen as a sub-topic or a puff piece–niche content. It is seldom front-page news. Yet, half our population is women, so why are women-centric stories still niche content?
Reality is far from these archetypes I have laid out. No one woman is but a victim, a pseudo-soldier, a peacemaker. They contain elements of all these things and more. When we operate under the assumption that women in their natural state are peace-loving beings, we ignore their agency in the conflict.
Many women may be happy to avoid the draft. But others, and this is clear, are choosing to fight alongside men. When they do so, they are not victims of the circumstances, but agents of action.
The Mystique of the Female Soldier: Portrayals of Ukrainian Women in Western Media
BY SARAH KEISLER
Dozens of news outlets worldwide have reported on Miss Ukraine Anastasiia Lena’s viral Instagram story.
The conflict in Ukraine is one of the largest Europe has seen since World War II. While warfare has changed a lot in 80 years, the way we perceive women’s roles in wartime has remained largely the same. When it comes to their role in the conflict, women in Ukraine are still fit into gender-appropriate boxes, removed from the main narrative.
One of the foundational works on the study of women and war is “Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics,” which theorizes that the study of women’s roles in conflict is often reduced to the archetypes, removing their agency to choose violence over peace. In the western media’s coverage of the Ukraine conflict, we are seeing the women of Ukraine broken up into three basic archetypes. On one end, we have the provider of peace—removed from the conflict, women play the role of truce-maker. On the other end, we have the female soldier. She may carry the same weapon as the man, but she’ll never be a real warrior. Then, we have the victim. With the men gone, they are the women who struggle to support their families without the men at home.
How we talk about women in foreign policy and security is important. When we frame women in a way that makes them tangential to the conflict, we erase the very real contributions that they make to the situation. While women may not be actively drafted to fight in this war, they are also experiencing it. They have a real role in the conflict and the solution.
Below the surface, above the archetypes, what does the portrayal of women in war say about what their place is in conflict?
La Femme Fatal.
While there are thousands of women choosing to fight for Ukraine on the front lines, coverage of female fighters reduces them to toy soldiers. There has not been a shortage of coverage for women’s roles in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
On Twitter, a single photo of a female soldier has gone viral because “women joined defense too.” Captions like this miss the point: the image of a woman dressed for battle is not an indicator of the severity of the conflict, but the severity of this woman’s individual determination to defend her country. When we report “Even the women are joining the fight,” we pass on the damaging message that even when women are soldiers, they are victims.
It gets worse. New York Post published a piece called “Meet Ukraine’s gun-toting female soldiers fighting the propaganda war with Russia.” The story neglects the individual stories of the women behind the front lines and instead details young women in Ukrainian fatigues dancing for TikTok. Another piece by the Washington Post explains how Miss Ukraine Anastasiia Lena posted a picture with a weapon with the caption #handsoffUkraine. Instead of serving as a symbol for real women who are deployed in the war, the image circulated widely, and Lena’s photo was the subject of online debate about whether her gun was real. There’s also a handful of stories in circulation about babushkas training to use rifles and practice self-defense.
These stories are typically treated as novelty ones. They are not hard news—they are written by features editors and social media columnists. They make headlines not because they depict the soldier’s experience, but because they emphasize the extent of the tragedy by demonstrating that even the women are fighting.
War is considered a masculine realm. So, when a woman is portrayed as warlike, she is not feminizing war. She is becoming more masculine. In this way, she is a pseudo-soldier—in costume. Stories about gun-toting babushkas and sexy troops are, therefore, fascinating. They subvert our view of women as peacemakers without directly challenging the cultural understanding that war is a man’s game.
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
This archetype comes in conflict with a different narrative: one of the women, regardless of their side in the conflict, as neutral peacemakers. Just before the breakout of invasion, The Nation published the article “Independent American and Russian Women Call for Peace” in which women of both nations call for “peace, diplomacy, and respect for all.”
This isn’t a false narrative by any means. In many conflicts around the world, groups of mothers often lead the way in calling for peace negotiations. Notably in Russia, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia is one of the country’s most politically powerful interest groups. Following the Russian invasion, thousands of Lithuanian women protested outside the Russian embassy calling on Russian mothers to stop the war.
While it is true that many women’s groups are calling for peace, the female gender itself does not represent peace, as the headline implies.
But we don’t see many Ukrainian women clamoring for the men to put down their arms. In fact, many are determined to fight alongside the men. While most definitions of womanhood don’t include picking up guns, the reality in Ukraine is that many women are doing just that.
Narratives like “Women call for peace” harmfully differentiate men and women in their determination to fight for their country. It groups all women into a stereotype of nonviolence. In doing so, the headline removes women’s agency in the choice to fight and minimizes women’s roles in the conflict.
The Victim.
As Ukraine has currently banned all men of age for military service from leaving the country, there’s also been a surge of stories about women fending for themselves as men go off to fight. Women take care of their families, many of them emigrating west, as the men stay behind. Here we see a third woman: with no power to change her circumstances, she is ravaged by war. She is a victim of circumstances, and watches powerlessly, far from the front lines.
In the parade of news coverage, this is perhaps the most common. Take this excerpt from an Al-Jazeera piece entitled, “On Ukraine’s front lines, women endure the war alone”:
“‘My husband died of a heart attack and my only son has disappeared. In my family, I am now the only woman left’… She cries as she recalls the last time she had hugged her son Oleg, who disappeared shortly after he had joined a paramilitary group in 2014… ‘When there is no heating, I put all my clothes on and pray. I have only one wish: that my son hugs me once again.’”
Again, these stories are not falsified. They are not dramatized. Yet, when they are the only perspective we see, they perpetuate something that is problematic: that women are objects upon which the act of war occurs.
Smashing archetypes.
It is important to critique the role of the media in war and geopolitics. After all, the way we talk about issues determines whether these issues are prioritized or securitized. The issue of gender remains de-securitized in much of the international affairs conversation. Women’s stories are still side-shows. We still live in a world where “Woman Defends her Country” makes a headline.
Worldwide coverage of women in the Ukraine crisis follows a narrow genre. “Women in the war” reporting is generally seen as a sub-topic or a puff piece–niche content. It is seldom front-page news. Yet, half our population is women, so why are women-centric stories still niche content?
Reality is far from these archetypes I have laid out. No one woman is but a victim, a pseudo-soldier, a peacemaker. They contain elements of all these things and more. When we operate under the assumption that women in their natural state are peace-loving beings, we ignore their agency in the conflict.
Many women may be happy to avoid the draft. But others, and this is clear, are choosing to fight alongside men. When they do so, they are not victims of the circumstances, but agents of action.
PUBLISHED BY SARAH KEISLER
28. Review | Deception has changed in the digital era, and spies are adapting
And SOF and the State Department and other government agencies as well. It is not just the intelligence community that must adapt.
Conclusion:
“Spies, Lies, and Algorithms” is a perfect primer for anyone trying to understand how the intelligence community is meeting the challenges of the digital age. The intelligence community must find its place in a world where much of the best intelligence may no longer be secret or controlled by the government. In fact, revealing what the community knows may be as important as what it doesn’t know. In a world where misconceptions or misunderstandings may lead to catastrophic failures, truth once again is a powerful weapon. It remains to be seen where and when Putin will meet his “Broken Bridge” of intelligence failures.
Review | Deception has changed in the digital era, and spies are adapting
By Dina Temple-Raston
Dina Temple-Raston, a former investigations and national security correspondent at NPR, is a senior investigations correspondent at the Record, a cyber and intelligence news service, and host of the Click Here podcast. She is the author of four books, including “A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder and a Small Town’s Struggle for Redemption.”
Today at 8:00 a.m. EDT
In the 1980s, when I lived in northeastern China, I used to visit a famous old railway bridge that spanned the Yalu River between the Chinese city of Dandong and Sinuiju, a town in North Korea.
During what the Chinese call the Great Fatherland Liberation War, what we call the Korean War, U.S. bombers blasted the bridge, and for decades, Chinese authorities have kept it just as it was — frozen in a crippled state of twisted metal and crumbling concrete.
The “Broken Bridge” is a visual reminder not only of American aggression but of an epic U.S. intelligence failure: U.S. intelligence officials were certain that China would never enter the war. But they were wrong.
Chinese soldiers had crossed the river and taken up positions in Korea awaiting U.S.-led forces. When the fighting started, American planes bombed the railway bridge to prevent China from sending reinforcements. But they were wrong about that, too. Chinese soldiers didn’t really need the bridge — they just walked across the frozen river.
What unfolded at the Yalu River in the 1950s, Zegart explains, was a prime example of intelligence analysis gone awry. CIA and military intelligence had concluded that China had no appetite for a war with the Americans, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur was so convinced of the fact that he told President Harry S. Truman that American troops would be home by Christmas.
“Chinese soldiers had been hiding undetected for a month,” Zegart writes. “The effect was devastating. Within weeks, UN forces lost thousands of men, two hundred miles of territory, and the advantage in the Korean War.”
Zegart contends that MacArthur had fallen prey to a common set of afflictions. “He allowed optimism to cloud his assessment of the facts, dismissed evidence that contradicted his prior beliefs, and built a team around him that discouraged dissent,” she writes. “The most important lesson from Korea isn’t that MacArthur failed in unique ways. It’s that he failed in ordinary ones. The cognitive filters that all humans use to process information can lead even the most determined leaders in the most important moments to fail.”
This lack of perspective can lead to misperceptions and deadly miscalculations.
President Vladimir Putin’s current foray into Ukraine feels like a modern-day reprise of MacArthur’s failed campaign. Putin thought Russian troops would roll into Ukraine without resistance, quickly install a pro-Moscow government and bring Kyiv to heel. “They thought it would be an easy walk,” Maria Zolkina, a Ukrainian political analyst, told me for a recent episode of the “Click Here” podcast, “and they will capture Kyiv and major cities, and that they will be met with the flowers by Ukrainians. … [Instead,] they are fighting like lions.”
Zegart reveals that the inspiration for the book came from one of her undergraduate courses. Her students seemed woefully ill-informed about how the intelligence community worked, and what little they did know came from Jason Bourne movies and from television, something she terms “spytainment.” (Federal prosecutors will tell you that they have the same problem, thanks to the CSI series. Juries want cases to end as tidily as they do in the hour-long show.)
Zegart’s goal was to remedy this. But as she was working on the book, the world changed. Technology changed. Open-source information — and data more generally — provided adversaries with a new array of exquisite tools, and the intelligence community was forced to adapt. It could no longer focus on geopolitics and human sources; now it had to understand evolving technology by private companies and social media platforms.
Zegart makes plain that in this new age, enemy states and terrorist groups have upped their game. They are now “hacking both machines and minds,” while “artificial intelligence is creating deepfake videos, audio, and photographs so real, their inauthenticity may be impossible to detect. No set of threats has changed so fast and demanded so much from intelligence.”
Essentially, Zegart maintains, the very essence of deception has morphed. During the Cold War, Chinese troops turned their coats inside out so they wouldn’t be spotted in the snowy hills near the Yalu River, and the Soviets launched “active measures” or rumor campaigns aimed at sowing doubt. Today’s high-tech information operations make those earlier efforts seem a trifle quaint.
“Now Russian disinformation is designed to flood the zone, reaching millions within hours across every format (text, video, audio, photos) and information channel imaginable — social media, Internet websites, satellite television, and traditional radio and television,” Zegart laments. “The aim is to overwhelm, divide, and breed distrust in information itself, undermining the democratic discourse.” We are approaching the era of truth decay.
Case in point: a set of protests in Texas in 2016. On one side of the street, a group called Heart of Texas was there to stop the “Islamization” of the Lone Star State. They wore “White lives matter” T-shirts and unfurled Confederate flags. On the other side were the United Muslims of America, waving “No Hate” placards. What none of the protesters knew was that the entire scene had been instigated by the Kremlin and a group called the Internet Research Agency.
“Inside nondescript offices in St. Petersburg, Russia, hundreds of trolls masqueraded as Americans in around-the-clock shifts — tweeting, liking, friending, and sharing in English to attract American followers,” Zegart records. The Russian campaign was all about creating Facebook groups meant to antagonize one another.
Ukraine has become the latest test bed for misinformation. Russia allegedly had plans to film a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in the Donbas region. The film was going to be used as a pretext for invasion — it would purportedly be proof positive that Ukraine was committing genocide.
We know about it because the Biden administration decided to openly release the intelligence it had gathered on the operation, essentially defanging the effort in advance. We have yet to see proof that it even existed, but if it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, telling everyone about it meant that the truth about the ploy was released before the lie had time to get its boots on (a reversal of the old adage — a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its socks on).
“Spies, Lies, and Algorithms” is a perfect primer for anyone trying to understand how the intelligence community is meeting the challenges of the digital age. The intelligence community must find its place in a world where much of the best intelligence may no longer be secret or controlled by the government. In fact, revealing what the community knows may be as important as what it doesn’t know. In a world where misconceptions or misunderstandings may lead to catastrophic failures, truth once again is a powerful weapon. It remains to be seen where and when Putin will meet his “Broken Bridge” of intelligence failures.
Spies, Lies, and Algorithms
The History and Future of American Intelligence
By Amy B. Zegart
Princeton. 405 pp. $29.95
29. Fueling Insurgency: Liquified Natural Gas, ISIS, and Green Berets in Mozambique
Conclusion:
Critics of US military assistance to Mozambique, such as the analyst Steven Leach, argue that the Biden administration should withdraw the Green Berets to reduce the perception that Mozambique is merely the latest US battleground against an ISIS affiliate. Leach advises prioritizing diplomacy and targeted development to address the root causes of the conflict.
But the humanitarian disaster unleashed by the conflict cannot be addressed through diplomacy alone. The presence of US special operations forces in Mozambique allows the United States to establish military partnerships as part of a diplomatic campaign to influence the government as its partner of choice. Ultimately, great power competition in Africa hinges on the United States’ ability to be a reliable partner to African governments as conflicts over resources continue to break out across the continent. The United States will not be able to bring peace to Cabo Delgado on its own. But it can help its local partners repel a brutal insurgency. And it can push the Mozambican government to make the domestic reforms necessary to prevent the outbreak of future violence in one of the continent’s most neglected and resource-rich regions.
Fueling Insurgency: Liquified Natural Gas, ISIS, and Green Berets in Mozambique - Modern War Institute
mwi.usma.edu · by José de Arimatéia da Cruz · March 18, 2022
In March 2021, roughly a dozen US Army Green Berets arrived in Mozambique to help train the Mozambican armed forces. In October, the USS Hershel “Woody” Williams made a port call to the capital described by the US ambassador to Mozambique as indicative of the “strength of the strategic partnership” with the United States. This increased security cooperation, which has made the United States the largest bilateral donor to Mozambique, comes as the southeast African nation attempts to contain a surging Islamic State affiliate.
Over the past five years, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria–Mozambique (ISIS-M), locally referred to as al-Shabaab (no direct connection to the Somali-based group), has organized an insurgency by leveraging economic grievances in a resource-rich, poverty-stricken region of the country. The insurgency finances its operations through illicit resource trafficking and recruits fighters with the promise of small loans to young men without opportunity. Today, the insurgency terrorizes the region of Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique, with tactics similar to Boko Haram’s razing of villages to capture sex slaves and youth fighters.
The conflict has displaced over half a million people since 2017. The violence inflicted on the region’s people only tells part of the story. This localized insurgency, which drove the Russian Wagner Group out of the region in 2019 and caused energy giants Total of France and Saipem of Italy to cease liquified natural gas extraction projects last spring, also demonstrates the power of insurgents to influence global investment in developing markets. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s halting of the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and Russia’s threats to shut off gas supplies to Europe, the demand for natural gas across the global north has increased while Mozambique’s supply remains cut off from the world market.
Today, the Mozambican armed forces, with the aid of a multinational regional coalition, are still fighting to regain control of the region. As the United States gets increasingly involved, it needs to understand the root causes of the conflict. The United States should specify its national interests and integrate diplomatic pressure with security assistance to not only quell the insurgency but push the government away from the abusive tactics and corruption that fueled it in the first place. The United States should also pay close attention: the situation in Cabo Delgado may foreshadow future conflicts in resource-rich regions of littoral Africa where foreign competitors jockey for influence.
Corruption Invites the Black Flag to Mozambique
The insurgency in Cabo Delgado has emerged after years of corruption, human rights violations, and population displacement. Cabo Delgado is a northeastern region of Mozambique bordered by Tanzania to the north and the Indian Ocean to the east. It is one of Mozambique’s poorest provinces despite rich reserves of natural resources. As the birthplace of the country’s independence movement in 1979, the region was ripe for armed resistance against a corrupt central government.
Widespread social discontent resulted in violent attacks against government and Western-affiliated targets such as banks, hotels, and a port. In 2018, the insurgency opportunistically rebranded itself as ISIS-M; it has since succeeded in cutting the world off from the African continent’s third largest natural gas reserves, located off of the Cabo Delgado coast.
Insurgency in Mozambique: A Local Stage with Global Actors
In 2019, Mozambique invited into the country members of the Wagner Group, the Kremlin-linked private military company, who quickly withdrew from a train-and-support mission after significant losses. Following its retreat, the government turned to the South African Dyck Advisory Group, a mercenary group that Amnesty International has since accused of atrocities against local civilians. According to the Mozambique newspaper O Pais, a South African Navy ship, the SAS Makhanda, is patrolling the Cabo Delgado coast and the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM) recently extended its deployment, which began in June 2021. The SAMIM mission is composed of troops from eight regional countries fighting alongside the Mozambican armed forces and a contingent from Rwanda.
The introduction of a regional military coalition to the conflict raises concerns that weapons belonging to SADC forces will inevitably fall into the hands of ISIS-M and prolong the war, evoking fears about loose weapons exacerbating instability in places like Libya and Syria. As Mozambique has increased defense spending, ISIS-M has recovered military hardware on the battlefield and forced the withdrawal of newly acquired Mi-17 and Mi-24 helicopters during the attack on Palma.
In March 2021, the US State Department designated ISIS-M as a foreign terrorist organization. Shortly afterward, a US Green Beret detachment was sent to train Mozambican marines. In August, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken designated Bonomade Machude Omar as a specially designated global terrorist. Omar is an ISIS-M commander responsible for the attack on the Amarula Hotel in Palma, which indefinitely halted the Total gas extraction project. On March 1, 2022, the State Department designated four ISIS and ISIS-Mozambique financial facilitators in South Africa in an attempt to disrupt ISIS-M supporters.
The Economics of Instability and US Interests
In May 2021, Mozambique’s ambassador to the United States, Carlos dos Santos, described the discovery of vast natural gas reserves as an economic game-changer for the region and the continent. Dos Santos insisted that Cabo Delgado would become Mozambique’s “new global province of natural gas.” So far, however, this optimism has not been realized. Mozambique does not have the military resources necessary to defeat this insurgency unilaterally, and 2021 saw an increase in US security assistance to Mozambique.
According to a 2021 Congressional Research Service report articulating US interests, the instability in Cabo Delgado impacts a $4.7 billion US Export-Import Bank loan for the Total project and up to $1.5 billion in US International Development Finance Corporation political risk insurance for a planned ExxonMobil-led gas project. A range of US foreign aid and security cooperation programs aim to build security force capacity, foster economic development, and counter violent extremism. Some of this aid is separate from broader, non-insurgency-specific US bilateral assistance worth an estimated $536 million in fiscal year 2021.
The US State Department’s designation of Omar as a specially designated global terrorist will help the United States disrupt ISIS-M’s finances. But the insurgency’s networked illicit financing will require close partnerships across agencies and among allies to degrade the capacity to fund operations. The United States could also lean on the global coalition it formed in 2014 with eighty-three partner governments and institutions to defeat ISIS. Once ISIS is dislodged from Cabo Delgado, the United States could provide Mozambique with stabilization assistance, as it did in liberated parts of Iraq and Syria, to prevent the group’s reemergence.
The Entanglement of Security and Economic Stability
The Cabo Delgado conflict has rapidly progressed. What began as a localized insurgency involving foreign mercenary groups has now led to the emergence of an ISIS affiliate that has successfully disrupted critical global resource markets—at a time when much of the world is in dire need of additional natural gas supplies. As the US government moves to protect investments and counter ISIS, it needs to understand the root causes of this conflict to respond effectively. At its core, this conflict is a backlash against the exploitation of private resource contracts by a corrupt central government.
Critics of US military assistance to Mozambique, such as the analyst Steven Leach, argue that the Biden administration should withdraw the Green Berets to reduce the perception that Mozambique is merely the latest US battleground against an ISIS affiliate. Leach advises prioritizing diplomacy and targeted development to address the root causes of the conflict.
But the humanitarian disaster unleashed by the conflict cannot be addressed through diplomacy alone. The presence of US special operations forces in Mozambique allows the United States to establish military partnerships as part of a diplomatic campaign to influence the government as its partner of choice. Ultimately, great power competition in Africa hinges on the United States’ ability to be a reliable partner to African governments as conflicts over resources continue to break out across the continent. The United States will not be able to bring peace to Cabo Delgado on its own. But it can help its local partners repel a brutal insurgency. And it can push the Mozambican government to make the domestic reforms necessary to prevent the outbreak of future violence in one of the continent’s most neglected and resource-rich regions.
Dr. José de Arimatéia da Cruz is Professor of International Relations and Comparative Politics at Georgia Southern University and a Research Associate of the Brazil Research Unit at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, D.C..
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Kyle Steckler, US Navy
mwi.usma.edu · by José de Arimatéia da Cruz · March 18, 2022
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.
