Quotes of the Day:

“All things must be examined, debated, investigated, without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."

- Denis Diderot

“History is, indeed, little more than the register of the ’crimes, follies, and misfortunes’ of mankind. But what experience and history teach is is this – that peoples and governments never learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”

- Georg Hegel

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both, moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. “

- Frederick Douglass

1.RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 14 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (14.09.22) CDS comments on key events

3. Exclusive: As war began, Putin rejected a Ukraine peace deal recommended by aide

4. Europe is paying the price for its naivety about Russia, says Finnish PM

5. Army acquisition chief 'not uncomfortable' with US stockpiles, considers multi-year deals

6. Legendary Army Ranger, who fought in three wars, dies at 97

7. The Struggling Arkansas Town That Helped Stop Russia in Its Tracks

8. An Unarmed Putin Wants a Culture War With the West

9. Time Is Running Out to Defend Taiwan

10. Don’t Just Applaud Ukraine’s Counteroffensive. Time to Send More Weapons

11. The Unkept Promises of Western Aid

12. Ukraine War Offers Clues to Future War, Joint Chiefs Chairman Says

13. Ukraine faces ‘tough fight’ even as some Russian forces retreat, says US

14. Ukraine Signals Major Weapons Request for Long-Term Offensive Against Russia

15. Assessment: How the U.S. and Europe Have Aided Ukraine and What Must Be Done

16. WITHOUT YOU (EU versus Disinformation)

17. Why The Russia-Iran Alliance Will Backfire: Whither Iran?

18. Women Still Unable to Break Glass Ceiling of Navy SEAL Qualifications

19.  David Patrikarakos: could Putin now lash out after troops surrender?

20. Senate advances $6.5 billion Taiwan military aid bill

21. Xi and Putin want to create a new world order. Russia's setback in Ukraine could spoil their plans

22. The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War

23. Putin and Xi due to discuss Ukraine and Taiwan

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 14 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-14

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is being established as the face of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine.
• Russian forces likely targeted Ukrainian hydrotechnical infrastructure in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in order to interfere with Ukraine’s ability to operate across the Inhulets River
• The Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Kharkiv Oblast continues to degrade Russian forces and threaten Russian artillery and air defenses.
• Russian and Ukrainian sources reported Ukrainian ground attacks in northern Kherson Oblast, western Kherson Oblast, and northwest of Kherson City but did not report any major gains.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut and northwest and southwest of Donetsk City.
• Funding volunteer battalions is likely placing financial strain on Russian cities and oblasts.
• Russian occupation authorities shut off mobile internet in occupied Luhansk Oblast on September 14, likely to preserve Russian operational security and better control the information environment as Russian forces, occupation officials, and collaborators flee newly-liberated Kharkiv Oblast for Russian and Russian-controlled territories.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, SEPTEMBER 14

Sep 14, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 14

Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Katherine Lawlor, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

September 14, 8:15pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is being established as the face of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine. Prigozhin gave a recruitment speech on September 14 announcing that Russian prisoners have been participating in the war since July 1 when they were instrumental in seizing the Vuhlehirska Thermal Power Plant.[1] A Russian milblogger noted that Prigozhin is introducing a “Stalinist” method that allows the Kremlin to avoid ordering a general mobilization that could ignite social tensions in Russian society.[2] Milbloggers have been consistently praising Prigozhin’s success in Ukraine and some even said that he should replace the Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, whom milbloggers and Kremlin pundits blame for the Russian defeat around Kharkiv Oblast.[3] Russian military correspondent and milblogger Maksim Fomin (alias Vladlen Tatarsky) claimed to have spoken to Prigozhin about the situation on the Ukrainian-Russian border after the withdrawal of Russian forces in the area.[4] The Prigozhin-Fomin meeting, if it occurred, could indicate that the Kremlin is attempting to address milbloggers’ months-long complaints that the Russian Defense Ministry did not hear their criticism highlighting the ineffectiveness of Russian higher command. Prigozhin is Putin’s close confidant, and his developing relationship with milbloggers may help retain milblogger support for the Kremlin’s war effort while scapegoating Shoigu and the Russian Defense Ministry for the defeat around Kharkiv Oblast. ISW previously assessed that the Kremlin has changed its information approach to address the demands of the Russian milbloggers and nationalists’, suggesting that Putin seeks to win back the critical milblogger community alienated by Russian failures.[5]

Russian forces likely targeted Ukrainian hydrotechnical infrastructure in western Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on September 14 to interfere with Ukrainian operations across the Inhulets River. Ukrainian sources reported that eight Russian cruise missiles struck unspecified targets in Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and caused extensive flooding in areas of Kryvyi Rih.[6] Russian sources identified the target location as the Karachun Dam, which sits along the Inhulets River on the western outskirts of Kryvyi Rih.[7] Footage of the aftermath of the strike shows a 2.5m increase in the water level of the Inhulets River, which runs south of Kryvyi Rih and is an important geographical feature for the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive along the Kherson-Mykolaiv border.[8] Russian forces likely targeted the Karachun Dam to damage Ukrainian pontoon bridges further downstream, especially in light of recent reports that Ukrainian troops are attempting to expand their bridgehead over the Inhulets River near Davydiv Brid as part of the ongoing Kherson counteroffensive.[9]

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is being established as the face of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine.
• Russian forces likely targeted Ukrainian hydrotechnical infrastructure in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in order to interfere with Ukraine’s ability to operate across the Inhulets River
• The Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Kharkiv Oblast continues to degrade Russian forces and threaten Russian artillery and air defenses.
• Russian and Ukrainian sources reported Ukrainian ground attacks in northern Kherson Oblast, western Kherson Oblast, and northwest of Kherson City but did not report any major gains.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut and northwest and southwest of Donetsk City.
• Funding volunteer battalions is likely placing financial strain on Russian cities and oblasts.
• Russian occupation authorities shut off mobile internet in occupied Luhansk Oblast on September 14, likely to preserve Russian operational security and better control the information environment as Russian forces, occupation officials, and collaborators flee newly-liberated Kharkiv Oblast for Russian and Russian-controlled territories.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Southern and Eastern Ukraine
• Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Vovchansk-Kupyansk-Izyum-Lyman Line)

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Kharkiv Oblast continues to degrade Russian forces and threaten Russian artillery and air defenses. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on September 14 that the intensity of Russian artillery attacks on Kharkiv City has decreased significantly, suggesting that Ukraine's counteroffensive has degraded Russian forces’ ability to conduct routine artillery strikes on the center of Kharkiv City as Russian forces have been pushed eastward towards the Oskil River and north back into Russia.[10] Ukrainian advances in eastern Ukraine have likely forced Russian forces to pull air defenses further away from the frontlines in order to protect those systems from Ukrainian artillery fire, potentially exposing frontline Russian troops to air attacks. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on September 14 that Russian convoys carrying S-300 and Buk systems moved through Lutuhine, Luhansk Oblast in the direction of the Russian border on September 11 and 12.[11]

Russian sources continued to discuss limited Ukrainian ground attacks in eastern Kharkiv, northern Donetsk, and western Luhansk Oblasts. Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian and proxy forces are defending against Ukrainian attacks on Lyman in northern Donetsk Oblast.[12] Russian sources also reported that fighting is ongoing in Bilohorivka (along the Donetsk-Luhansk Oblast border) and in nearby settlements around Siversk.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian troops attempted to attack in Spirne (12km south of Bilohorivka), likely in an attempt to push northwards and threaten Ukrainian forces in Bilohorivka.[14]

Southern Ukraine: (Kherson Oblast)

Ukrainian military sources maintained their operational silence on September 14. Kherson Oblast Council Head Oleksandr Samoilenko announced that Ukrainian forces have liberated Kyselivka, approximately 23km northwest of Kherson City, but Ukrainian military officials have not confirmed the liberation of the settlement at this time.[15] ISW has not seen any visual evidence supporting Samoilenko‘s statement, and Russian sources denied Ukrainian local reports of advances in the area.[16] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian strikes are continuously undermining Russian efforts to repair the Kakhovka Bridge over the Dnipro River and have rendered the Darivka pontoon bridge over the Inhulets River impassable.[17] Ukrainian forces have reportedly continued to target Russian crossings near the Antonivka area and are firing at Russian convoys.[18] Ukrainian forces maintained their interdiction campaign, reportedly targeting Russian manpower and equipment concentration points in Hola Prystan (approximately 12km southwest of Kherson City), Dudchany, and Mylove (both on the T0403 highway).[19] The Southern Operational Command also stated that Ukrainian forces inflicted damage on four ammunition depots in Kherson Raion.[20] The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Russian forces continued to house troops in residential areas, specifically in the Chaplynka Raion north of the Kherson Oblast-Crimea border.[21]

Social media footage and statements by Russian-appointed occupation officials are corroborating the ongoing Ukrainian interdiction campaign. Geolocated footage showed the aftermath of the Ukrainian strike on the School of Higher Sportsmanship, which reportedly served as an area of Russian troop concentration.[22] Geolocated footage also showed a Ukrainian volunteer air reconnaissance unit striking a Russian storage building in Velyka Oleksandrivka, on the T2207 highway.[23] Local residents also reported hearing the sound of explosions and six missile strikes near Kherson City.[24] The head of the Kherson Oblast occupation administration, Vladimir Saldo, stated that Ukrainian forces struck the Antonivsky Bridge, but noted that occupation authorities are continuing to use ferry crossings in the area.[25] The deputy head of the Kherson Oblast occupation regime, Kirill Stremousov, claimed that Ukrainian forces fired at a ferry transporting civilians across the Dnipro River near the Antonivsky Bridge.[26] Numerous geolocated videos show that Russian forces are using ferries to transport military equipment across the Dnipro River, and Stremousov did not provide evidence supporting his claims.[27]

Ukrainian and Russian sources identified three main areas of kinetic activity on September 14: northwest of Kherson City, around the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River, and south of the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Border near Vysokopillya. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces have adopted defensive measures near Posad-Pokrovske (about 30km northwest of Kherson City) and are conducting probing operations by firing at Russian defenses in Blahodatne and Barvinok (just south of Posad-Pokrovske).[28] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults on Novohryhorivka (29km northwest of Kherson City) and Bezimenne near the Inhulets River.[29] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces shelled Mala Seideminukha and Novohredevne—both settlements near the Inhulets just south of Blahodativka—which indicates that Ukrainian troops have advanced further west from within the Sukhyi Stavok pocket.[30] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) also claimed that Russian forces destroyed Ukrainian military equipment in Bruskynske, along the T2207 highway that runs into Davydiv Brid.[31] A milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces are attacking Arkhanhelske (southwest of Vysokopillya) and Kostyrka (southeast of Vysokopillya).[32] A milblogger claimed that Russian forces also struck Ukrainian forces in Potomkyne (southeast of Vysokopillya).[33]

The Russian MoD did not comment on the situation in Kherson Oblast on September 14, only claiming that Russian troops struck Ukrainian positions along the Kherson-Mykolaiv frontline.[34]

Russian Main Effort- Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort- Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian troops continued ground attacks throughout Donetsk Oblast on September 14. Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that Russian troops, specifically Wagner Group detachments, conducted ground assaults south of Bakhmut.[35] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Territorial Defense claimed that proxy troops took control of Mykhailivka and Mykhailivka Druha, both about 12km southwest of Bakhmut along the T0513 highway.[36] Russian sources also discussed continued Russian ground assaults northeast of Bakhmut around Soledar.[37] The Ukrainian General Staff additionally stated that Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northwest and southwest of Donetsk City.[38] Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes around Bakhmut, Donetsk City, and in western Donetsk Oblast.[39]

Supporting Effort- Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 14 and continued to fire along the line of contact.[40] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian troops are amassing along the Zaporizhia Oblast frontline and that Ukrainian troops attempted a failed offensive from Orikhiv (about 50km southeast of Zaporizhzhia City) towards Nestryanka (10km southeast of Orikhiv).[41] Russian sources are seemingly concerned that Ukrainian troops may attempt to attack Vasylivka or push south on Russian-occupied Tokmak.[42] Russian forces also continued routine shelling throughout Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts.[43]

Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian military authorities continue to rely heavily on ostensibly Chechen units to generate combat power for operations in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on September 14 that Russian leadership plans to redeploy four Chechen battalions to Ukraine, but these battalions are significantly understrength and comprised mainly of non-Chechen mercenaries from economically depressed regions of Russia.[44] Social media footage circulated on pro-Russian channels showed a detachment of Chechen servicemembers arriving in an unspecified area of Ukraine.[45]

Funding volunteer battalions is likely placing financial strain on Russian cities and oblasts. An opposition member of the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly, Boris Vyshnevskiy, filed a motion on September 14 asking the city’s governor to explain which part of the city’s budget is providing funding for the city’s volunteer battalions.[46] The city government rejected his motion, likely suggesting either that the St Petersburg government does not have sufficient funding for the battalion, that funding for the battalion is coming from the Kremlin, or that the city is diverting funding from other programs in a way that would be embarrassing to admit publicly. The model of having localities pay for parts of the volunteer program was likely a Kremlin attempt both to obfuscate and to disperse the cost of the program.

Russian military leadership is likely attempting to force Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) proxy forces evacuated from Kharkiv Oblast to relocate to frontlines in Donetsk Oblast, rather than reinforcing the new frontlines in Luhansk, their home province. Odesa military spokesperson Sergey Bratchuk reshared a Telegram post alleging that women in Luhansk attempted to protest the LNR forces’ immediate redeployment and shared a video of many uniformed personnel and civilians on the streets in an unspecified location.[47] Forcing proxy forces to fight outside of their claimed oblasts will likely exacerbate morale issues and possible insubordination among proxy forces particularly if Ukrainian forces advance further into Luhansk Oblast.

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian occupation authorities shut off mobile internet in occupied Luhansk Oblast on September 14, likely to preserve Russian operational security and better control the information environment as Russian forces, occupation officials, and collaborators flee newly-liberated Kharkiv Oblast for Russian and Russian-controlled territories. The Ukrainian head of Luhansk Oblast, Serhiy Haidai, reported on September 14 that occupation authorities ostensibly shut down the internet “to ensure defense capability and security,” but implied that occupation authorities intended the shutdown, at least in part, to hide large-scale evacuations and looting.[48]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[15] https://tsn dot ua/ato/zsu-vzyali-pid-kontrol-kiselivku-teper-vid-hersona-ukrayinsku-armiya-viddilyaye-lishe-chornobayivka-mapa-2157904.html; https://www.pravda.com dot ua/news/2022/09/14/7367490/; https://interfax.com dot ua/news/general/858883.html

[44] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/viiskovi-chastyny-rf-skasovuiut-vidpravku-pidrozdiliv-v-ukrainu-cherez-masovi-vidmovy-osobovoho-skladu-braty-uchast-u-boiovykh-diiakh.html

[46] https://www dot zaks.ru/new/archive/view/230711

understandingwar.org

2. Ukraine: CDS Daily brief (14.09.22) CDS comments on key events

CDS Daily brief (14.09.22) CDS comments on key events

Humanitarian aspect:

On today's visit to the recently liberated Balakliia, Kharkiv Oblast, President Zelenskyy said that during the occupation of Izyum and Balaklia in the Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian forces behaved the same way as they did in Kyiv Oblast: they tortured residents, destroyed kindergartens and schools, and other infrastructure.

On the evening of September 14, the Russian military launched a missile attack on Kryvyi Rih (hometown of president Zelenskyy). At 7:47 p.m., the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko, informed that the Russian forces hit critical infrastructure facilities with seven Kh-22 cruise missiles launched from strategic aviation aircraft. As a result of the impact, water supply structures were seriously damaged, and several districts of Kryvyi Rih were left without water. Also, due to the shelling, the water leakage is 100 cubic meters per second, reports Deputy Head of the President's Office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko. "The water level in the streets of the city is constantly monitored. We also monitor the private sector in the Ingulets and Central City districts, where there is a risk of flooding."

The Russian forces again shelled the Nikopol district of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. They fired 75 shells from heavy artillery. Two communities - Marganets and Nikopol - came under fire. Civilian infrastructure was damaged, but no causalities were reported, Head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Military Administration, Vadym Reznichenko, said.

On the evening of September 14, the Russian military launched two missile strikes on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhya, Oleksandr Starukh, head of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast Military Administration, said. According to preliminary information, there were no casualties.

Mortar shelling near the village of Halahanivka of Chernihiv Oblast was recorded last night. However, no losses and destruction were reported, the head of Chernihiv Oblast Administration said.

During the past day, the Russian forces shelled populated areas of Izyum, Kupyansk and Chuhuyiv districts of Kharkiv Oblast. According to the Center for Emergency Medical Assistance, three people were hospitalized.

At night, the enemy S-300 rocket struck the town of Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast, destroying a private house; the enemy shelling of Myrnograd damaged a school; the shelling of Mykolaivka damaged the sports complex. Five people died, and 16 were wounded in the Oblast during the day on September 13. The Oblast remains without gas and partly without water and electricity. The mandatory evacuation of the population continues, the head of Donetsk Oblast Military Administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, reported.

Mykolaiv was hit by S-300-type missiles at night. An educational institution, infrastructure facilities and residential buildings were damaged. According to preliminary data, two people were killed, three were injured, and three were treated on an outpatient basis.

Bereznehuvate community, Mykolayiv Oblast, located on the front line, remains under constant fire. On Tuesday afternoon, there was the shelling of Krasny Yar village, and Bereznehuvate station was shelled in the evening. Also, at 23:50, shelling was recorded on the outskirts of Bereznehuvate. There are no casualties. The villages of Shyroke amalgamated community and territories outside of its boundaries got shelled throughout the day on September 13, head of Mykolayiv Oblast Military Administration Vitaliy Kim reported.

Sixteen communities have been completely freed from the Russian invaders, 6% of Kharkiv Oblast is still temporarily occupied by Russian forces, the head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration, Oleh Synehubov, said. This is down from 32%, which were under Russian occupation before the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

While restoring the critical infrastructure in the recently liberated Balaklia, Oleksandr Strelets, the service foreman of the electric lines at the Kupyansky high-voltage power station, died after hitting a booby trap left by the Russian invaders, Balaklia Municipal Council said.

Occupied territories

According to a member of the Mejlis of Crimean Tatar people Eskender Bariev, the Crimean occupation authorities clamped down on the Bakhchisaray wedding participants, where guests danced to a Ukrainian patriotic song (See CDS Brief of September 12, 2022). The owner of the "Arpat" restaurant in Bakhchisarai was handed down 15 days of administrative arrest, the DJ was given 10 days and had to apologize on camera, the groom's mother got 5 days, the mother of the bride and the wife of the owner of the restaurant were fined 50 thousand rubles each, the dancer got an admin arrest for 10 days.

First-grade pupils in Mariupol are forced to use Russian textbooks for their studies. They are told that Mariupol is Russia, and their homework is to learn the Russian anthem, Petro Andryushchenko, the advisor to the city mayor, said.

Ukrinform reports, with reference to its sources, that the number of Russian citizens and Ukrainian collaborators in Kherson who want to resign from the local police has increased significantly due to the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast. They claim that they resign due to the "inability of the management to ensure proper working conditions."

Over the past day, Ukrainian police launched 27 criminal investigations into the crimes of the Russian army and their accomplices in the territory of Kherson Oblast. Breaking into a public children's library and a bank and seizing all of their assets is among the crimes, Kherson Oblast police reported.

A draft law stipulating criminal liability for obtaining a Russian passport in the temporarily occupied territories was elaborated by experts from the Prosecutor General's Office, SBU, the Ministry of Reintegration, human rights defenders and MPs, the Reintegration Ministry reported. The Ministry stressed that obtaining a Russian passport in the temporarily occupied territories is justified only if a person thus tries to return to the territory controlled by Ukraine through Russia and third countries.

Operational situation

It is the 203rd day of the strategic air-ground offensive operation of the Russian Armed Forces against Ukraine (in the official terminology of the Russian Federation - "operation to protect Donbas"). The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts on establishing control over the territory of Donetsk Oblast, maintaining control over the temporarily captured territories and disrupting the offensive of the Ukrainian troops in certain directions.

Shelling of the Ukrainian Defense Forces' positions along the contact line continues. The Russian military is trying to regroup its troops in certain directions and conducts aerial reconnaissance. The threat of air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine persists.

The Russian forces continue attacking civilian infrastructure objects, violating the norms of International Humanitarian Law, laws and customs of war. The infrastructure of more than 33 Ukrainian towns and villages was damaged by enemy air strikes, missile strikes, and shelling from MLRS, including in Kharkiv, Lozova, Siversk, Bilohorivka, Mykolaivka, Verkhnokamyanske, Soledar, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Vesela Dolyna, Zaitseve, Yuryivka, New York, Pervomaiske, Kam'yanka, Vremivka, Stepove, Mali Shcherbaky, Sukhy Stavok, Kostromka, Bila Krynytsia, and Myrne. The Russian forces shelled the border villages Senkivka in Chernihiv Oblast and Stepne in Sumy Oblast.

Over the past 24 hours, the Russian forces have launched 3 missile strikes, 33 air strikes and fired 58 MLRS strikes at military and civilian targets on the territory of Ukraine.

The Russian army suffers significant manpower losses every day and tries to compensate them in different ways. The military leadership continues to search for those willing to fight among prisoners, particularly in the Russian Tula Oblast [prison] colonies. Recruiters promise convicts to have their criminal records removed in exchange for 3 months of service; for recidivists or those convicted of severe crimes, the term of service will be 6 months. However, no interested parties signed the contracts.

Sergey Mironov, the leader of the "A Just Russia - For Truth" party, called for "social mobilization" under which ordinary Russians would pay more attention to the war in Ukraine rather than total military mobilization. The bill to simplify the delivery of conscription notices was submitted to the Russian parliament. It is likely to pass. It will allow Russian military commissariats to send conscription notices by mail rather than present them in person. In addition, it will oblige men who do not receive a notification by mail still report to the local conscription point.

The Russian military leadership is taking measures to replenish its army with junior officers. According to available information, the early graduation of the 5th-year cadets of the "Nakhimov Black Sea Higher Naval School" was announced in December this year. Also, early graduations will take place in other educational institutions of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

Recruitment of so-called "reservists" to the Russian 3rd Army Corps continues. There is a large number of people with drug and alcohol addiction among the already recruited personnel.

The fact of forced mobilization in the Ukrainian city of Horlivka (occupied by Russia) shows the problems with unit staffing. The local so-called "military commissars" and "police" were tasked to recruit 6,000 people by September 19. The search and arrest of men continue in the city, which in turn causes mass dissatisfaction among local residents.

During the past day, to support the ground groupings, Ukrainian Air Forces carried out 12 strikes on Russian manpower and equipment concentration places.

Air defense units of the Ukrainian Forces destroyed two Russian aircraft (Su-25 and Su-24M), one Mi-8 helicopter and an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Units of the Ukrainian missile troops and artillery fired at 9 control points of the brigade and battalion levels and three areas of concentration of the Russian manpower and combat equipment.

The morale of the personnel of the invasion forces is considerably deteriorating due to significant losses and unwillingness to fight. The number of deserters in the Russian units is increasing.

Kharkiv direction

• Zolochiv-Balakleya section: approximate length of combat line - 147 km, number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 10-12, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 13.3 km;

• Deployed enemy BTGs: 26th, 153rd and 197th tank regiments, 245th motorized rifle regiment of the 47th tank division, 6th and 239th tank regiments, 228th motorized rifle regiment of the 90th tank division, 1st motorized rifle regiment, 1st tank regiment of the 2nd motorized rifle division, 25th and 138th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 6th Combined Arms Army, 27th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Tank Army, 275th and 280th motorized rifle regiments, 11th tank regiment of the 18th motorized rifle division of the 11 Army Corps, 7th motorized rifle regiment of the 11th Army Corps, 80th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 14th Army Corps, 2nd and 45th separate SOF brigades of the Airborne Forces, 1st Army Corps of so-called DPR, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled the infrastructure of Basove and Kupyansk with tanks, mortars and artillery.

Ukrainian troops crossed the Oskil River in Borova.

Ukrainian Defense forces shot down an Iranian-origin Russian kamikaze UAV "Shahed-136" (Russian name - "M412 Geran-2") in Kupyansk.

Kramatorsk direction

● Balakleya - Siversk section: approximate length of the combat line - 184 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17-20, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.6 km;

●  252nd and 752nd motorized rifle regiments of the 3rd motorized rifle division, 1st, 13th and 12th tank regiments, 423rd motorized rifle regiment of the 4th tank division, 201st military base, 15th, 21st, 30th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 3rd and 14th separate SOF brigades, 2nd and 4th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 2nd Army Corps, 7th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Army Corps, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled Yaremivka, Tetyanivka, Raihorodok, Siversk, Bilohorivka, Kryva Luka, Spirne, Verkhnokamyanske, Dronivka, Hryhorivka, and Zvanivka.

Ukrainian troops are fighting in the area of Bilohorivka (30 km east of Lyman), trying to break through the Russian defenses in the west of Luhansk Oblast and in the area of Lysychansk- Sievierodonetsk.

The Russian military did not have time to build a solid defense line east of Oskil. Still, it started forming two position areas, where the remaining Russian troops from Izyum are gradually retreating. The first area - Nyzhnya Duvanka - Naugolne - Kuzemivka - Svatove (up to two BTGs probably from the composition of units of the 41st Combined Arms Army); the second area - south of Svatove along the border Miluvatka - Krasnorichenske (remnants of two BTGs from military units of the 41st Combined Arms Army, remnants of two BTGs of the 3rd motorized rifle division of the 20th Combined Arms Army, up to one and a half BTG of the 1st Tank Army).

The units of the Russian Armed Forces, which have lost combat capability and are no longer able to participate in high-intensity battles, are trying to independently and gradually withdraw to the north through Nove and Makiivka in the direction of Svatove. New enemy units from those defeated in Kharkiv Oblast started forming there.

In the Lyman area, up to three BTGs of the 2nd Combined Arms Army are trying to hold back the advance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to gain time to organize a defensive line on the eastern bank of the Oskil River.

Along the Bilohorivka-Verkhnokamyanka frontier, the Russian military concentrated at least four BTGs from the "mobilization reserve", "Wagner" PMC and units of the 55th separate motorized rifle brigade and 90th tank division.

Donetsk direction

● Siversk - Maryinka section: approximate length of the combat line - 235 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 13-15, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 17 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 68th and 163rd tank regiments, 102nd and 103rd motorized rifle regiments of the 150 motorized rifle division, 80th tank regiment of the 90th tank division, 35th, 55th and 74th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 41st Combined Arms Army, 31st separate airborne assault brigade, 61st separate marines brigade of the Joint Strategic Command "Northern Fleet", 336th separate marines brigade, 24th separate SOF brigade, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 15th, and 100th separate motorized rifle brigades, 9th and 11th separate motorized rifle regiment of the 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, 6th motorized rifle regiment of the 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian military shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces using tanks, mortars, barrel and jet artillery in the areas of Yuryivka, New York, Mykolaivka, Mykolaivka Druha, Zaitseve, Soledar, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Yakovlivka, Maryinka, Krasnohorivka, Pervomaiske and Novomykhailivka.

The Ukrainian Defense forces successfully repelled enemy attacks in the areas of Spirne, Mayorsk, Odradivka, Vesela Dolyna, Vodyane, Avdiivka, Bezimenne and Novohryhorivka.

Fighters of the "Wagner" PMC captured Mykhailivka Druha. Russian troops reached the outskirts of Bakhmut and took positions in the industrial zone on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut. They regularly shelled the positions of Ukrainian troops along the Bakhmut and Avdiyivka-Donetsk front line.

Ukrainian guerrillas attacked a Russian patrol in Mariupol with explosives while it was trying to erase the "Ї" symbol painted on a building [Ї is a letter of the Ukrainian alphabet used as a symbol of resistance in the occupied territories]. The attack left three Russian occupiers wounded.

Zaporizhzhya direction

●  Maryinka – Vasylivka section: approximate length of the line of combat - 200 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 17, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 11.7 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 36th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 29th Combined Arms Army, 38th and 64th separate motorized rifle brigades, 69th separate cover brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army, 5th separate tank brigade, 37 separate motorized rifle brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 429th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 136th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 58 Combined Arms Army, 46th and 49th machine gun artillery regiments of the 18th machine gun artillery division of the 68th Army Corps, 39th separate motorized rifle brigade of the 68th Army Corps, 83th separate airborne assault brigade, 40th and 155th separate marines brigades, 22nd separate SOF brigade, 1st Army Corps of the so-called DPR, and 2nd Army Corps of the so-called LPR, PMCs.

The Russian forces shelled the positions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces near Velyka Novosilka, Novodonetske, Vremivka, Novopil, Hulyaipole, Zaliznychne, and Chervone.

Kherson direction

● Vasylivka–Nova Zburyivka and Stanislav section: approximate length of the battle line - 252 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces - 27, the average width of the combat area of one BTG - 9.3 km;

●  Deployed BTGs: 114th, 143rd and 394th motorized rifle regiments, 218th tank regiment of the 127th motorized rifle division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 57th and 60th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 5th Combined Arms Army, 135th, 503rd and 693rd motorized rifle regiments of the 19th motorized rifle division, 70th, 71st and 291st motorized rifle regiments of the 42nd motorized rifle division, 51st and 137th parachute airborne regiments of the 106th parachute airborne division, 7th military base of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 16th and 346th separate SOF brigades.

There is no change in the operational situation. Russian occupiers move into the homes of local residents in the villages of Chaplynka district of Kherson Oblast, in some places evicting the owners from their houses.

The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian MOD reported that the Russian authorities in Crimea called on their families to flee to Russia. Russian FSB employees are selling their homes on the peninsula and urgently evacuating their families due to the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Currently, the occupiers are trying to strengthen their grouping near the temporarily occupied Kherson by drawing upon "available reserves". For this purpose, a redeployment of 4 battalions of the so-called "Kadyrov's" is planned. However, these units are currently significantly understaffed. Most of the personnel are not Chechens but mercenaries from the poorest regions of the Russian Federation.

Kherson-Berislav bridgehead

●  Velyka Lepetikha – Oleksandrivka section: approximate length of the battle line – 250 km, the number of BTGs of the RF Armed Forces – 22, the average width of the combat area of one BTG –

11.8 km;

● Deployed BTGs: 108th Air assault regiment, 171st separate airborne assault brigade of the 7th Air assault division, 4th military base of the 58th Combined Arms Army, 429th motorized rifle regiment of the 19th motorized rifle division, 33rd and 255th motorized rifle regiments of the 20th motorized rifle division, 34th and 205th separate motorized rifle brigades of the 49th Combined Arms Army, 224th, 237th and 239th Air assault regiments of the 76th Air assault division, 217th and 331 Air assault regiments of the 98th Air assault division, 126th separate coastal defense brigade, 127th separate ranger brigade, 11th separate airborne assault brigade, 10th separate SOF brigade, PMC.

The Russian forces shelled Tavriyske, Myrne, Ternovi Pody, Partyzanske, Chervona Dolyna, Bilohirka, Novohredneve, Bezymene, Sukhy Stavok, Bila Krynytsia, Olhyne, Vysokopillya, Kamiane. They constantly conduct aerial reconnaissance with UAVs.

Ukrainian troops carried out attacks in three main directions along the Kherson-Mykolaiv front line: the north of Kherson Oblast to the south of the border with Dnipropetrovsk Oblast; the west of the Kherson Oblast along the Inhulets River; to the northwest of the city of Kherson.

The Ukrainian Defense Forces have liberated Oleksandrivka. They consolidate their positions in Olhyne and prepare for attacks along the Arkhangelske line in the direction of Novopetrivka. Ukrainian units attacked Davydiv Brid. They are regrouping near Sukhyi Stavok for an offensive in the direction of Bruskynsk along the T2207 route. Fighting continues in the area of Ternovi Pody. The Ukrainian Defense Forces try to advance south towards Chornobayivka and Kherson.

Russian troops tried to advance on Bezimenne to the south of Sukhyi Stavok. They also tried to attack along the line Ternovi Pody - Lyubomirivka.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces continue the campaign to block the Russian military's logistical and transport assets in the south of Ukraine to support operations on the Kherson-Mykolaiv front line.

During the day on September 13, Ukrainian aviation dealt 11 strikes on the concentration of Russian manpower and equipment. Ukrainian troops continue shelling Russian military and logistical facilities on the territory of Kherson Oblast.

Azov-Black Sea Maritime Operational Area:

The forces of the Russian Black Sea Fleet continue to project force on the coast and the continental part of Ukraine and control the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The ultimate goal is to deprive Ukraine of access to the sea and connect unrecognized Transnistria with the Russian Federation by land through the coast of the Black and Azov seas.

Along the southern coast of Crimea, there are six enemy cruise missile carriers, including two submarines. Up to 40 enemy Kalibr missiles are ready for a salvo.

Additionally, 14 other enemy warships and vessels of the auxiliary fleet of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla are at sea, providing reconnaissance and blockade of navigation in the Azov-Black Sea waters.

Four large amphibious ships are maneuvering near the southern part of the occupied Crimea. These maneuvers are possibly related to the combat coordination of the recently created marine infantry grouping based on the 382nd separate battalion of the Russian marines (based in the city of Temryuk, Krasnodar Krai, Russia). The rest of the amphibious ships (8 units) are in the ports of Novorossiysk and Sevastopol for replenishment and scheduled maintenance. There are no signs of preparation for an amphibious assault on the southern coast of Ukraine.

Russian aviation continues to fly from the Crimean airfields of Belbek and Hvardiyske over the northwestern part of the Black Sea. Over the past day, 10 Su-27, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft from Belbek and Saki airfields were involved.

On September 14, as part of the implementation of the "grain initiative", 5 ships with 153,000 tons of food left the ports of "Odesa", "Chornomorsk" and "Pivdenny", the press service of the Infrastructure Ministry reported. They are headed for the countries of Asia and Europe. During the 1.5 months of operation of the "grain corridor", 3.1 million tons of agricultural products were exported through the ports of Odesa. A total of 134 ships with agricultural products for Asian, European and African countries have left Ukrainian ports.

There are certain systemic indicators that the Russian Federation may not extend the grain agreement, which expires in November 2022 (120 days). Increasingly, Russian officials (led by Putin) claim that the interests of the Russian Federation regarding the export of its agricultural products from Russian ports are not considered. A separate memorandum on this issue was developed and signed (together with the agreement) between the Russian Federation and the UN. The text of this memorandum is classified, but experts consider its content's relevance to the UN's main activity doubtful.

In case the Russian Federation withdraws from the grain agreement, they most likely would continue missile attacks from ships and coastal missile systems of the Russian Federation in Crimea on ships sailing to the ports of Ukraine. The Russian Black Sea Fleet currently has 9 surface and 4 underwater carriers of Kalibr missiles available for this purpose in the Black Sea (total possible salvo of 86 Kalibr missiles) and 8 ships with Soviet-made anti-ship systems (40 anti-ship missiles in total), Bal (X-35 missile) and Bastion (P-800 Onyx missile) complexes. In addition, enemy aviation use is possible.

Russian operational losses from 24.02 to 14.09

Personnel - almost 53,650people (+350); Tanks – 2,180 (+5);

Armored combat vehicles – 4,665 (+3);

Artillery systems – 1,290 (+11);

Multiple rocket launchers (MLRS) - 311 (0); Anti-aircraft warfare systems - 167 (+2); Vehicles and fuel tanks – 3,501 (+32); Aircraft - 246 (+2);

Helicopters – 215 (+2);

UAV operational and tactical level - 908 (+4); Intercepted cruise missiles - 233 (0);

Boats / ships - 15 (0).

Ukraine, general news

Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the President's Office, emphasized how important it is for Ukraine to receive weapons from international partners. "First of all, it is necessary to protect critical infrastructure facilities with air defense systems. Because Russia will fight only civilians. Secondly, the liberation of Luhansk or Donetsk will cause a domino effect, collapse the Russian front and lead to political destabilization in the Russian Federation. It's real. We need the will (weapons)," Podolyak emphasized.

NSDC Secretary Oleksiy Danilov told Polish publication Wirtualna Polska that the IAEA's visit to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant captured by the Russian military did not yield the desired results. One could talk about results if Russians had left the station. Danilov believes that the world underestimates the nuclear terrorist threat of the Russian Federation.

International diplomatic aspect

Russian media reports that Vladimir Putin decided to go to war anyway, ignoring the enormous concession his chief emissary Dmitriy Kozak negotiated at the beginning of the all-out invasion. Putin ruled out a deal on the neutral status he had pretended to be seeking. Instead, he signalled that after launching the war, his aims expanded to annexing new Ukrainian territories. The Kremlin's spokesperson denied the whole thing. Whatever was a compromise in the first days of the invasion, it's not relevant anymore.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy rules out the possibility of giving up on NATO membership and giving up illegally occupied territories, including Crimea. Kyiv Security Compact, a concept of possible security guarantees agreement, was presented at the Office of the President. The concept looks more thoughtful and coherent than previously announced ideas. However, the document is rather a tool to strengthen Ukraine's ability to defend itself than security guarantees. The paper aims to beef up Ukraine's ability to defend itself until it becomes a member of NATO. It implies a framework document and bilateral agreements on mechanisms and the legal obligation of participating states to provide Ukraine with various assistance and impose costs (sanctions) on Russia. Besides the issue of legally binding status, an important part is missing. There're no mechanisms of security guarantees to non-nuclear states from the threats posed by nuclear power. Anyway, until drafts of the Kyiv Security Compact and relevant bilateral agreements are made public, it's too premature to judge the idea's viability.

European Union Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen delivered a State of the Union (speech). She stated that from the day of the all-out invasion, "a whole continent has risen in solidarity," and it will be the case as long as necessary. She radiated enthusiasm and hope to say, "We have brought Europe's inner strength back to the surface." Russia's brutal war gave a new impetus to the EU and NATO. Ukrainian struggle for freedom and the European future has given the Europeans a feeling of purpose and understanding that neither peace and security nor democracy is for granted. Ursula von der Leyen stressed that this is a "war on our values and a war on our future. This is about autocracy against democracy". She shared her conviction that "with courage and solidarity, Putin will fail, and Ukraine and Europe will prevail". In the face of coming hardship, it's crucial that Europe stays united in support of Ukraine and in imposing the cost on Russia, regardless of the pain this struggle for the future of the continent brings.

After the telephone conversation between the French and the Russian presidents, Russian forces unleashed a missiles attack on the Kharkiv Thermal Power Plant that caused a total blackout in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions and a partial one in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions. The phone conversation between the German Chancellor and the Russian Presidents was followed by a missile hit to hydraulic structures that might have caused the drawing of Kryvyi Rih, a native city to the President of Ukraine.

Russia, relevant news

The editor-in-chief of the Russian propaganda publication "Komsomolskaya Pravda", also known as Putin's favorite newspaper, Vladimir Sungorkin, unexpectedly died of a stroke during an expedition to Primorye at the age of 68, "Komsomolskaya Pravda" informed.

According to an internal document of the Russian Ministry of Finance prepared for a high-level meeting, the Russian financial sector suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in direct losses from the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies due to the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine, Bloomberg reported. The report includes only sanctions on the financial sector.

A French court has rejected a request to lift the arrest of the yacht Amore Vero detained in early March in the city of La Ciotat in the south of the country. The head of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, may be the beneficiary of the company-owner and commercial operator of the vessel, AFP reports.

The Italian Eni has reduced the share of Russian oil purchases from 18% (2021) to 7% (Q2 of this year). In addition, the company is selling its stake (8.33%) in the RSK Raffinerie GmbH refinery in Schwedt (Germany), where oil is supplied from Russia via the Druzhba pipeline, Russian business publication Kommersant reports.

The Speaker of the Russian parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, suggested that the State Duma classify the discussion on a "special operation" in Ukraine.

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3. Exclusive: As war began, Putin rejected a Ukraine peace deal recommended by aide

Some of the political warfare preceding the invasions.

Excerpts:

But, despite earlier backing the negotiations, Putin made it clear when presented with Kozak's deal that the concessions negotiated by his aide did not go far enough and that he had expanded his objectives to include annexing swathes of Ukrainian territory, the sources said. The upshot: the deal was dropped.

Asked about Reuters findings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "That has absolutely no relation to reality. No such thing ever happened. It is absolutely incorrect information."

Kozak did not respond to requests for comment sent via the Kremlin.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said Russia had used the negotiations as a smokescreen to prepare for its invasion, but he did not respond to questions about the substance of the talks nor confirm that a preliminary deal was reached. "Today, we clearly understand that the Russian side has never been interested in a peaceful settlement," Podolyak said.

Exclusive: As war began, Putin rejected a Ukraine peace deal recommended by aide

Reuters · by Reuters

PARIS, Sept 14 (Reuters) - Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign, according to three people close to the Russian leadership.

The Ukrainian-born envoy, Dmitry Kozak, told Putin that he believed the deal he had hammered out removed the need for Russia to pursue a large-scale occupation of Ukraine, according to these sources. Kozak's recommendation to Putin to adopt the deal is being reported by Reuters for the first time.

Putin had repeatedly asserted prior to the war that NATO and its military infrastructure were creeping closer to Russia's borders by accepting new members from eastern Europe, and that the alliance was now preparing to bring Ukraine into its orbit too. Putin publicly said that represented an existential threat to Russia, forcing him to react.

But, despite earlier backing the negotiations, Putin made it clear when presented with Kozak's deal that the concessions negotiated by his aide did not go far enough and that he had expanded his objectives to include annexing swathes of Ukrainian territory, the sources said. The upshot: the deal was dropped.

Asked about Reuters findings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "That has absolutely no relation to reality. No such thing ever happened. It is absolutely incorrect information."

Kozak did not respond to requests for comment sent via the Kremlin.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said Russia had used the negotiations as a smokescreen to prepare for its invasion, but he did not respond to questions about the substance of the talks nor confirm that a preliminary deal was reached. "Today, we clearly understand that the Russian side has never been interested in a peaceful settlement," Podolyak said.

Two of the three sources said a push to get the deal finalized occurred immediately after Russia's Feb. 24 invasion. Within days, Kozak believed he had Ukraine's agreement to the main terms Russia had been seeking and recommended to Putin that he sign an agreement, the sources said.

"After Feb. 24, Kozak was given carte blanche: they gave him the green light; he got the deal. He brought it back and they told him to clear off. Everything was cancelled. Putin simply changed the plan as he went along," said one of the sources close to the Russian leadership.

The third source - who was told about the events by people who were briefed on the discussions between Kozak and Putin - differed on the timing, saying Kozak had proposed the deal to Putin, and had it rejected, just before the invasion. The sources all requested anonymity to share sensitive internal information.

Moscow's offensive in Ukraine is the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II. It prompted sweeping economic sanctions against Russia and military support for Ukraine from Washington and its Western allies.

Even if Putin had acquiesced to Kozak's plan, it remains uncertain if the war would have ended. Reuters was unable to verify independently that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or senior officials in his government were committed to the deal.

Kozak, who is 63, has been a loyal lieutenant to Putin since working with him in the 1990s in the St. Petersburg mayor's office.

Kozak was well-placed to negotiate a peace deal because since 2020 Putin had tasked him with conducting talks with Ukrainian counterparts about the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists following an uprising in 2014. After leading the Russian delegation in talks with Ukrainian officials in Berlin on Feb. 10 – brokered by France and Germany – Kozak told a late-night news conference that the latest round of those negotiations had ended without a breakthrough.

Kozak also was one of those present when, three days before the invasion, Putin gathered his military and security chiefs and key aides in the Kremlin's Yekaterinsky hall for a meeting of Russia's Security Council.

State television cameras recorded part of the meeting, where Putin laid out plans to give formal recognition to separatist entities in eastern Ukraine.

Once the cameras were ushered out of the vast room with its neo-classical columns and domed ceiling, Kozak spoke out against Russia taking any steps to escalate the situation with Ukraine, said two of the three people close to the Russian leadership, as well as a third person who learned about what happened from people who took part in the meeting.

Another individual interviewed by Reuters, who helped in the post-invasion talks, said discussions fell apart in early March when Ukrainian officials understood Putin was committed to pressing ahead with the large-scale invasion.

Six months on from the start of the war, Kozak remains in his post as Kremlin deputy chief of staff. But he is no longer handling the Ukraine dossier, according to six of the sources who spoke to Reuters.

"From what I can see, Kozak is nowhere to be seen," said one of the six, a source close to the separatist leadership in eastern Ukraine.

Editing by Daniel Flynn

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

4. Europe is paying the price for its naivety about Russia, says Finnish PM

Most all of us have been naive (and too many still are) about Russia,

Europe is paying the price for its naivety about Russia, says Finnish PM

https://www.brusselstimes.com/289058/europe-is-paying-the-price-for-its-naivety-about-russia-finnish-p-m-says?utm_source=pocket_mylist

Tuesday, 13 September 2022

By 

The Brussels Times with Belga

Credit: Belga

“We have to admit that we have been too naïve about Russia and that today we are paying the price, a high price, that of our dependence on Russian energy,” Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told the European Parliament on Tuesday.

“We have built our assumptions about Russia’s activities on wrong ideas,” she said. “We should have listened more closely to our friends from the Baltic States and Poland who lived under Soviet rule,” said the 36-year-old Social Democratic leader, whose country shares more than 1,300 kms of border with Russia.

Prime Minister Marin was the guest on Tuesday of “This is Europe,” a series of debates in which leaders of EU Member States expose their vision of the Union at a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

In terms of energy, in particular, Europe should have changed its supply model much earlier for environmental reasons, which would have prevented it from finding itself in the present situation vis-à-vis Russia, she noted.

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However, in her eyes, nothing is lost since the EU 27 will find solutions together. “Russia’s actions have unified the West as never before,” she said, “while Russia is lonelier than ever.”

In the end, Marin predicted that Russia will become impoverished by its military campaign while Sweden and Finland will have become members of NATO.

5. Army acquisition chief 'not uncomfortable' with US stockpiles, considers multi-year deals

The concluding statement says to me that we intend to remain the arsenal of democracy.

Excerpts:

Bush told reporters that there were more Javelin contracts coming to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine, adding that the Army is looking to get over $1 billion worth of Javelins on contract by the end of fiscal 2023. He added that the service was “dramatically increasing” Javelin production year over year as well.

“We’ve got to replace thousands and we also want to set the stage for increased production for allies,” Bush said.

Army acquisition chief 'not uncomfortable' with US stockpiles, considers multi-year deals - Breaking Defense

Doug Bush laid out multiple avenues for keeping US stockpiles intact while keeping Ukraine armed for its battle against Russia, including potential industry incentives and getting help from America's friends.

breakingdefense.com · by Andrew Eversden · September 14, 2022

Charlie Battery, 2nd Battalion, 218th Field Artillery Regiment, 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team (IBCT), Oregon National Guard fires their M777 155mm Howitzer at Yakima Training Center, Wash., on July 13, 2022. (Maj. W. Chris Clyne, US Army National Guard)

WASHINGTON — The Army’s top acquisition official said today he’s “not uncomfortable” with the state of Army munitions stockpiles in the wake of months of arms transfers to Ukraine, but said the Army is doggedly working with industry — including potentially offering multi-year procurement contracts — to boost the production of certain weapons systems to keep Kyiv armed and the US well stocked.

Doug Bush, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told reporters that he spends the bulk of his time working to expand US production of 155mm artillery, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) or Javelins that have so critical to Ukraine’s recent successes against Russia. Specifically, Bush said the Army was aiming to “dramatically increase” production of GMLRS and is “doubling or more than doubling” production rates for HIMARS launchers.

To accomplish that, Bush said, the Army is leaning on congressional support, and also on the defense industry. For that latter, Bush said the Army — and the Pentagon — was considering the use of multi-year procurement contracts that could help assuage contractor fears of unstable markets for the systems. Bush’s comments came after the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, Bill LaPlante, signaled the Defense Department was open to multi-year arrangements.

“Industry, if they have a guaranteed five-year production run for something, they can actually buy in quantity and manage supply lines more efficiently, so yes,” Bush said. “We have to ask and Congress has to approve, but multi-year for certain things would certainly make a lot of sense in my view, but there’s a lot of other people who are going to contribute to that decision.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the Defense Department has sent $14.5 billion in military aid to the Ukrainians, drawn from US stocks and in direct orders from contractors. The Pentagon has so far sent 8,500 Javelins, 1,600 Stingers, 16 HIMARS and about 807,000 rounds of 155mm artillery for 126 155mm howitzers, according to a Sept. 8 fact sheet from the Pentagon. The US has also sent GMLRS, the munition for the HIMARS.

The transfer of US inventories of weapons and ammo to Ukraine has raised concerns about the amount left in US stocks. And while Bush said he wasn’t uncomfortable with the Army’s stocks in general, he later dodged a question about whether the Army had enough ammunition if a large-scale conflict broke out soon, stating that it’s a question for the chief of staff of the Army and secretary of the Army.

Bush, instead, focused on how he said the Army was working to replenish what’s been transferred, and who he said could help while the Army ramps up.

“So those efforts are our number one course of action right now that we’re focused on, to provide … three things: increased production for supporting Ukraine, replenishing our own stocks, and then setting ourselves up to be able to provide [and] be able to respond to additional allies requests outside of Ukraine,” he said.

While the Army is aiming to boost production rates domestically, Bush said the goal production rates the service aimed for are still in the “high number of months to a year” out, making the production partnerships and donations more important.

Therefore, Bush said another “major” line of effort was working with allies to take advantage of their industrial capacity to make munitions, such as the 155mm, with a third line of effort focused on pushing allies to donate equipment to Ukraine.

“In the meantime, that’s why those other lines of effort are so important,” he said. “Using our allies who in some cases can produce more quickly because they have facilities are not using it all. And then getting our allies to donate as well to reduce the demand that we have to provide.”

For the 155mm artillery, the Wall Street Journal reported that defense officials were concerned that the stocks were “uncomfortably low,” but not critically low.

On Tuesday, the Defense Department announced that it had awarded a $311 million contract for Javelins to the Raytheon and Lockheed Martin joint venture that produces the weapons system. The contract procure Javelins for Lithuania and Jordan, but includes 1,800 Javelins to replenish rounds sent to Ukraine.

“As Javelin continues to demonstrate its reliability and effectiveness, its reputation as the premier battle-proven, fire-and-forget precision anti-armor weapon grows,” said Marek Wolert, Javelin joint venture president and Raytheon Missiles & Defense’s javelin program director, in a statement. “Our commitment to delivering this exceptional weapon system to global ground forces is unwavering.”

Bush told reporters that there were more Javelin contracts coming to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine, adding that the Army is looking to get over $1 billion worth of Javelins on contract by the end of fiscal 2023. He added that the service was “dramatically increasing” Javelin production year over year as well.

“We’ve got to replace thousands and we also want to set the stage for increased production for allies,” Bush said.

6. Legendary Army Ranger, who fought in three wars, dies at 97

Another American hero. I was fortunate to be in the 506th Infantry when he was the honorary Colonel of the Regiment. He not only jumped into Europe, he jumped into Munsan-ni with the 187th during the Korean War.

Legendary Army Ranger, who fought in three wars, dies at 97

militarytimes.com · by Sarah Sicard · September 14, 2022

The soldier for whom the Army’s Best Ranger Competition is named passed away Sept. 11 at age 97.

Retired Lt. Gen. David E. Grange, Jr. served in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He enlisted in 1943 and commissioned in 1950 after attending Officer Candidate School.

During World War II, Grange served as a paratrooper with the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He played a role in the Rome-Arno, Southern France, Rhineland, Ardennes, and Central Europe campaigns. When the war ended, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division before going to OCS.

Upon commission as a 2nd lieutenant, Grange was sent to Korea as a rifle platoon leader with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment. After Korea, he was a Ranger instructor and served as an Army staff officer, according to the Association of the U.S. Army.

In 1963, he entered his third war as an adviser in Vietnam on his first of three tours to the country. Grange’s second and third tours were spent with the 506th Infantry Regiment and 101st Airborne Division, respectively. His last post was as commanding general of the Sixth U.S. Army.

He retired in 1984 with 41 years of service.

Grange is highly decorated, with awards including the “Defense Distinguished Service Medal; Army Distinguished Service Medal; Silver Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters; Legion of Merit with one Oak Leaf Cluster; Distinguished Flying Cross; Soldier’s Medal; 28 awards of the Air Medal with V; Bronze Star Medal with V and four Oak Leaf Clusters; Joint Service Commendation Medal with V; United States Army Commendation Medal with V and four Oak Leaf Clusters; Air Force Commendation Medal; and the Purple Heart,” reads the 506th Infantry’s unit history.

“France has awarded him the Legion of Honor in the degree of Officer,” the history adds. “Korea has awarded General Grange the Wharang Medal with Gold Star, the Kuksun Medal and the Cheonsu Medal. Vietnam awarded him the Gallantry Cross with two palms and Silver Star, and the Military Honor Medal, First Class.”

In 1984, the “LTG David E. Grange, Jr. Best Ranger Competition” was named in his honor.

About Sarah Sicard

Sarah Sicard is a Senior Editor with Military Times. She previously served as the Digitial Editor of Military Times and the Army Times Editor. Other work can be found at National Defense Magazine, Task & Purpose, and Defense News.

7. The Struggling Arkansas Town That Helped Stop Russia in Its Tracks

An element of our industrial base. Note the shortage of skilled workers.

The Struggling Arkansas Town That Helped Stop Russia in Its Tracks

Politico

Magazine

Some of the most crucial weapons in the Ukraine war are made in Camden, Arkansas. But a shortage of skilled workers risks slowing the production lines.

Travis Daniel stands in front of the mural he commissioned on the downtown building he remodeled into studio apartments for the growing defense workforce. "It’s time to get on up in the modern age.” | Photos by John David Pittman for POLITICO

09/09/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Bryan Bender is a senior national correspondent for POLITICO

CAMDEN, Arkansas — The mural Travis Daniel commissioned for the derelict building he purchased and renovated into studio apartments is a soaring tribute to this rural community’s economic lifeline.

Emblazoned with images of heroic defense workers against a backdrop of streaking rockets, missiles and fighter jets, it’s also a billboard he hopes will draw more engineers, technicians and interns who make up most of his tenants and the foot traffic for the businesses that are slowly sprouting up amid the downtown’s shuttered storefronts.

“I had been looking for something special and unique out there,” the former Army reservist told me in late August in A Cup of Joe, a new coffee shop that has opened in the building. “We have these historical murals already, but it’s Civil War stuff. It’s time to get on up in the modern age.”

“So I decided to put some MLRS out there and ATACMS,” he explained, referring to depictions of the Multiple Launch Rocket System and Army Tactical Missile Systems that are among the armaments manufactured in nearby Highland Industrial Park.

Nestled in the remote backwoods of southern Arkansas, some of the nation’s busiest weapons plants are gearing up for historic levels of defense spending and to replenish the stocks of artillery, high-caliber ammunition, rockets, missiles and propulsion systems that have been siphoned off to help Ukraine even the battlefield odds against Russia. Widely circulated images of burned out Russian military vehicles littering the roadways are the result of Javelin anti-tank missiles. A major Ukrainian counteroffensive now underway has been fueled by access to the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which is helping turn the tide against Russian forces.

And the pressure is growing to keep the production lines humming to feed what has become a surprisingly long conflict that could stretch on for many more months before it is done. Demand for munitions in Ukraine has been so high that it has drained inventories in the U.S. and Europe. Thousands of missiles and artillery rounds and have already been siphoned off from armories on both sides of the Atlantic and now there is a scramble to replenish them.

But what the heroic mural doesn’t show is an endemic economic frailty that is placing that supply in jeopardy. The weapons factories are facing an acute shortage of skilled labor in a region that, despite the tentative signs of new life, is still reeling from two decades of population exodus brought on by the closure of a major paper bag plant.

More than a dozen conversations with defense industry executives, business and political leaders and long-time residents offered a local illustration of a nationwide struggle to fill high-tech, high-paying jobs. In short, a longstanding weakness in the U.S. workforce could have potentially serious consequences on allies’ ability to help Ukraine and delay efforts to resupply their own forces in the event of a new conflict. And it’s one reason why defense industry leaders have been warning Congress that it could take several years to replace some of the weapons supplies that have been so depleted, raising fears that the readiness of U.S. forces to deter Russia or China could ultimately suffer.

“Where do we find the technical workers, the engineers who are willing to move into south Arkansas and work in the industry?” Mike Preston, Arkansas’ secretary of commerce, asked when we met in his Little Rock office. “We have right now more people working in the history of our state than we have at any point. We’re at 3.3 percent unemployment. And there are 70,000 open jobs in our state.”

The uniquely urgent circumstances confronting the Camden area are also drawing new attention in Washington.

“We are using a lot of the munitions that are being made there in Ukraine,” Republican Sen. John Boozman, the state’s senior U.S. senator, told me. “What we’ve been trying to do is make sure the workforce is there. Making sure we have affordable housing, good education systems, good health care systems, the list goes on. Also, making sure that our vocational-technical colleges are providing the workforce that they need.”

But there are significant shortfalls in skills among the local population. Arkansas has historically ranked near the bottom of states for educational attainment. In the southern part of the state, the challenges are even more acute. For example, recent government data shows that in Camden, roughly half the adult population has a high school equivalency or less and only 15 percent have a four-year college degree. For now, the solution to the recruiting problem means making the area more attractive for workers from outside the region.

“That’s my worry,” John Schaffitzel, president of the Highland Industrial Park, confided over dinner at Postmasters Grille, a steakhouse in the restored 19th century post office that once served the bustling port city on the banks of the Ouachita River and now caters to the defense workforce. “The energy is here. How do you get assistance and programs and put grants in the right place to give a sense of quality of life for these workers? How do you create a quality of life in a town of 12,000 to attract skilled workers and engineers to come and live?”’

The crossroads of Ouachita and Calhoun counties, dotted with small towns and hamlets connected by narrow ribbons of highway that wind through thick pine forests, is not widely recognized outside the region as a major hub of defense production. Camden for all its importance to weapons manufacturing doesn’t even have a cool nickname like Huntsville, Alabama — known as “Rocket City.”

“I tell people, ‘When you think you’re lost, you’re almost here,’” quipped Erik Perrin, director of operations at General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, who has lived in the area for 18 years.

But it was in adjacent East Camden, at the height of World War II, that the Navy constructed the Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot to assemble and store torpedoes, bombs and other explosives. Now, the 18,500 acres that make up the Highland Industrial Park provide unique incentives to leading weapons producers. Manufacturing and warehousing facilities — including scores of storehouses that date back nearly 80 years — dot the vast landscape of winding roads, woods, marshes and railroad tracks.

Arkansas’ status as a right-to-work state, where labor unions are less of a factor for companies, has attracted defense contractors. “I use it in my sales pitch all the time,” Preston, who is also executive director of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, volunteered. “It does not hurt us at all.” But the biggest draw for the defense industry to the area has always been the 700 highly secure earthen bunkers, or explosive storage magazines, that were dug during World War II deep in the woods, away from prying eyes.

They are critical for what by definition is an extremely dangerous line of work that requires a safe environment. The industrial park is festooned with signs that read “Safety Always” and “Right the First Time” — a reminder of the tons of explosives required for the production process and the unique facilities that are needed to warehouse the weapons once they are assembled.

Those bunkers are now used by some of America’s largest defense contractors, who have invested significant capital in making Camden a home for building a variety of their major weapons systems. “You have to have a place to store incoming material and you have to have a place to store outgoing goods,” Perrin explained.

The sprawling industrial center is now a nerve center for some of the nation’s biggest military contractors — as well as some of their weapons that have slowed and, in some cases, even beat back the Russian assault.

Raytheon Technologies builds components for Tomahawk and Standard missiles for the Navy. Lockheed Martin assembles the Army’s Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and Theater High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile systems, along with ATACMS, MLRS, and the HIMARS, which has recently grabbed headlines in Ukraine for its ability to strike behind Russian lines and put invading forces on the defensive. General Dynamics builds Hydra 70 air-to-ground rockets and the warheads for a pair of weapons that have almost become household names: the Javelins and the Stinger anti-aircraft missile. Meanwhile, Aerojet Rocketdyne, which opened a new 51,000-foot facility in early August, supplies the other companies with rocket motors and other parts. And they are all backed by smaller aerospace and defense suppliers.

“A lot of the frontline weapon systems we get to watch on CNN so intently come out of Camden, Arkansas, in some form or fashion,” as Perrin put it, underlining how the conflict in Ukraine is one of the few in recent decades where so many heavy weapons designed for conventional warfare between opposing armies are actually being used.

For many here, that just means more well-paying jobs — many of them in the six-figure salary range.

“My friends may make a passing comment about the war in Ukraine but not often,” Daniel told me. “Same when I’m with my family. I have friends and family that work on the rockets at the various manufacturing plants out there. … Those companies sell to many different entities. It may be hard to say if this one is going to Ukraine or Taiwan.”

But many of the estimated 2,800 workers employed in the defense plants are commuting from places such as El Dorado, Hot Springs, or even Little Rock more than 100 miles away — while others lodge Monday through Thursday before returning to their permanent homes in more attractive cities and towns.

“We’ve lost population like a lot of small towns have,” James Lee Silliman, executive director of the Ouachita Partnership for Economic Development, told me. Camden hit a high of 15,800 in the 1960s, but it has lost nearly 2,000 people just in the last decade.

“That’s the case of all of south Arkansas,” he added. We’re trying to make the community more attractive and a good place to live.”

Silliman, who grew up in Camden, was sitting in his office conference room, which features two large photographs of the former International Paper plant that operated for 73 years before it shut down in 2000.

“It was a huge loss,” he said. “We’ve had some struggles over the last 22 years. I would hate to think what our area would be like without the aerospace and defense industry that are located in Highland Park. Lockheed and Aerojet, with their recent investments and expansions, have added employment. They’ve kept the light on.”

Highland Industrial Park’s most prized tenant may be Southern Arkansas University Tech, the two-year community college that serves as an incubator for the weapons plants and provides workforce development training.

The main cluster of campus buildings, situated opposite Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control’s headquarters complex, seems caught between two worlds.

The modern student center, dining hall and athletic facility are interspersed among dilapidated barracks and makeshift classrooms that have finally been cleared of asbestos and lead and are being refurbished, including into dormitories to accommodate more students. The SAU Tech student body has grown from 82 approximately five years ago to 200 this year. And it is expected to reach up to 240 by the fall of 2023 — explosive growth in percentage terms but modest in real numbers.

“We do a lot of customized training for the industry,” Chancellor Jason Morrison told me in his office in a two-story structure dating from the original naval depot. “A lot of people come who work in other industries and they need retraining.”

One of the first things he did when he took the job more than five years ago was to replace the school’s mascot, the Varmints, with the Rockets.

“It’s kind of the heart of our whole history here,” he said. “What do we do in south Arkansas? We make rockets. We make rocket motors. We support the defense industry and NASA. It has economic potential and growth. A lot of that responsibility falls on the college to attract and prepare the students for the jobs of tomorrow.”

He makes a compelling pitch for prospective students, most of whom come from the local region. They are often the first generation in their families to get a higher education, or are the children of workers on the assembly lines.

“You can actually complete a two-year degree and your starting wages will be far above that of someone with a four-year degree,” he said.

Another talking point: These are not your father’s or grandmother’s grimy, unhealthy factory jobs. “I think a lot of students have this misunderstanding of what manufacturing looks like,” Morrison said. “It is a very clean advanced manufacturing world.”

Brooke Avant, a second-year student whose sister attended SAU Tech and whose father works for Lockheed Martin, is earning an associate’s degree in cybersecurity. She was originally studying psychology, but “I kind of switched just because of cybersecurity being such a growing field,” she told me in the Tech Diner on campus.

I asked Avant if she is considering following in her father’s footsteps and seeking employment across the road. “That could be like a potential workplace,” she said.

Morrison, who regularly meets with the defense and aerospace companies through a workforce advisory board, says it’s increasingly difficult for the technical college to keep up with demand for workers or to train current employees.

A snapshot: Aerojet lists 82 open positions in Camden. Raytheon lists three dozen, including openings among its suppliers. Lockheed Martin is advertising 18. And General Dynamics’ career website lists dozens more. All told, the number of available jobs is nearly equal to the total enrollment at SAU.

“The industries are extremely busy right now,” Morrison said. “You kind of feel it in the air. The traffic that comes and goes. There’s a lot of activity taking place. There’s so many jobs open right now. There are so many jobs available.”

On a recent midday, Camden Mayor Julian Lott, dressed in a gray suit and open-collared shirt, worked the lunch crowd at El Ranchito, a Mexican restaurant downtown. He chatted with the diverse customers and got up from his seat to greet an elderly gentleman who sought him out.

The city’s first elected Black mayor, who is also minister of nearby Koinonia Grace Church, Lott is running for re-election this fall. And much of his platform in the race for the nonpartisan position rests on the argument that Camden has been on the upswing under his leadership.

“We’re really headed in a good direction,” Lott told me over enchiladas and sweet tea. “We are getting those businesses moving. You have young people coming who are making good money. This is the result of a boom. I don’t want them to drive two hours to their jobs every day. That’s not sensible. That’s not only dangerous but it drains our community too, OK?”

The impact of the mini-boom at the weapons plants is being felt in many small ways in some very un-military downtown businesses such as Artisana Soaps.

“When we started, most of the buildings were empty,” Cecilia Davoren told me in her fragrant corner store, suffused with the pleasant aromas of handmade soaps and lotions. The foot traffic is really picking up, she said, and beginning to balance out her online business (which now has nearly half a million TikTok followers).

The storefront next door is still vacant, however. Leaning against the wall in the shop window is a sign that reads, “This building is not empty. It’s full of opportunity.”

“Small businesses are interested in investing in downtown,” Davoren said. “It has been a lot of effort. There are some people that work really hard in making downtown really nice. It’s growing. It’s growing.”

Down an alley and one street over is Native Dog Brewery, which was opened a year and a half ago by pharmacist couple Bobby Glaze, a Camden native, and his wife Lauren. They saw an opportunity to provide a local destination for the line workers and executives alike at the nearby defense plants to socialize — and connect with the community.

The Biden administration and Congress are taking new steps that will help ensure the expansion continues.

In August, the White House announced the largest single aid disbursement for Ukraine, totaling nearly $3 billion. On Thursday, it announced an additional $2.2 billion, nearly half to rearms allies that have also transferred munitions to Ukraine. It is asking Congress for billions more in the upcoming fiscal year. And for the first time since the start of the war, it is also financing contracts for new production, in the clearest sign of the long-term nature of the demand.

“I wish I had 10 more of these,” Daniel, the up-and-coming developer, said of the handful of old commercial buildings he has now bought up on the same block. “There is a great housing demand for people who work out there at the industrial plant.”

The war in Ukraine “helps guarantee they are going to be here longer, which is good for us,” added Glaze, who was tending to chores at the brewery when we spoke. “The longer they are open and doing well, the more jobs it brings into the community. It’s a shot in the arm for us to make sure we keep them going.”

But Mayor Lott also says he wants to make sure locals, who are majority Black, also get the training in science, technology, engineering and math they need to fill some of those good-paying jobs out at Highland Park — and not just those who might consider moving here.

“We’re encouraging women, Blacks, all minorities to get involved,” he told me. “And Lockheed Martin actually is a proponent to help get some of that done. They run a program out there at the high school that has been remarkable. But getting hired and actually getting to certain positions? You hear stories on the street that are a little different. So that’s a reputational thing that they’ll have to overcome.”

The mayor-minister also got a bit philosophical about being so reliant on weapons of war to lift the fortunes of a place that desperately needs it. He is proud of the work that is being done here but can’t help but think about the consequences when the products they build are sold or transferred to other countries.

He recalled a part-time job, long before he moved to Camden, for a weapons supplier that he declined to identify. Most days it was a four-hour shift with little activity at the storage bunkers he was paid to monitor.

“This particular day I was waiting on two different trucks,” he said. “We were standing around chatting and talking.”

The banter turned to who the customers might be for those weapons. Lott said he got the uncomfortable feeling that the supplier might have been arming enemies.

“It appeared to me that that one company was selling to two different sides, the same product.”

POLITICO

Politico

8. An Unarmed Putin Wants a Culture War With the West

But we have to be willing to operate effectively in the information/influence domain.

An Unarmed Putin Wants a Culture War With the West

He’ll discover that Russia has even less soft power than the Soviet Union.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-14/an-unarmed-putin-wants-to-fight-a-culture-war-with-the-west?srnd=premium-europe&sref=hhjZtX76

ByBobby Ghosh

September 14, 2022 at 12:00 AM EDT

Even as his troops retreated in disarray in eastern Ukraine last week, Vladimir Putin opened a new front in his war against the West: a “battle for cultural supremacy.” The Russian president declared his top foreign policy goal would be to lead a global counteroffensive against the “imposition of neoliberal views by a number of states.”

Russia, he claimed, is uniquely qualified for this task because it can offer the world an alternative to liberalism. “Centuries of history have given Russia a rich cultural heritage and spiritual potential that has put it in a unique position to successfully spread traditional Russian moral and religious values,” the statement said. 

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This will sound awfully familiar to any reader of recent Russian history. A hundred years ago, leaders of the new Soviet Union made similar claims of a Moscow-centered worldview to challenge liberalism. As Communists, they framed the contest in socioeconomic terms; proudly godless, they were hardly likely to invoke Russian religious values. It was no less a “battle for cultural supremacy” for that.

Putin, who tends to look back on the Soviet era through rose-tinted glasses, seems to have forgotten why his side lost that battle: It didn’t have sufficient weaponry. And his Russia is, if anything, even less equipped for the fight. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde (or Shakespeare, or Mark Twain), you shouldn’t engage in a battle for cultural supremacy when you’re unarmed.

Growing up in India in the 1970s, I had a ringside view of the contest — and remember how and why the Soviets lost, even though the field was tilted to their advantage. Although nominally non-aligned in the Cold War between Washington and Moscow, New Delhi leaned heavily to the Soviet side. After all, the USSR had supported India in its regional rivalry with US-backed Pakistan, providing arms, industrial knowhow and trade on favorable terms. Indians were encouraged to regard the West, and especially the US, with suspicion, even hostility, whereas the Russians were to be regarded as friends.

We were also discouraged from consuming Western products: Import restrictions kept most American brands out of reach, so the Soviet disadvantage in that area was not as great a handicap as it might have been. We never got to compare Ford and General Motors cars to Lada and Volga clunkers, for instance.

But when it came to cultural products, the Soviet disadvantage couldn’t be concealed. Indians, especially young Indians like myself, consumed Western literature, music, cinema and fashion. Although Moscow shipped quantities of books to India — translated into Indian languages and sold at heavily subsidized prices — they never gained much cachet with my cohort. There was no Soviet equivalent of the Hardy Boys or Betty and Veronica. Even those inclined to more serious literature found the Soviet offerings tended to tail off sharply after Pushkin and Chekov. (We did, however, read Russian authors Moscow proscribed, like Solzhenitsyn.)     

My collection of rock and pop albums had no Soviet representation, there was no such thing as a cool pair of Soviet sneakers, and although the Indian state TV channel dutifully aired Soviet movies, the local cinema halls featured the much more popular Hollywood fare. As a result of this exposure to Western culture, we generally admired Western lifestyles, which were shot through with liberal values.

All this helped the West, and especially America, exert soft power in India that squadrons of MiG-21s or Soviet manufacturing technology couldn’t match. And in my hometown, the port city of Visakhapatnam, it didn’t escape our attention that the Soviet engineers who were seconded to the local steel plant were just as enthusiastic as we were about American rock albums and blue jeans.

If the cultural contest seemed one-sided then, it is absurdly so now. Putin’s Russia has produced few, if any, cultural products of note. In a world far more receptive to non-English entertainment, there are no famous Russian soap operas, no R-Pop craze. Rollywood isn’t a thing. RT, the Kremlin’s 24-hour “news” channel, offers its viewers and listeners a parallel universe of conspiracy theories and out-and-out lies, but has gained little traction. 

If Russia is dwarfed by the likes of South Korea and Turkey in the cultural sphere, Moscow has little to offer outside it. Unlike the Soviet leaders he idolizes, Putin has no socioeconomic ideology to impress upon the wider world. Aside from military hardware, no Russian products or services are coveted by anybody. (And the damage wrought by US and NATO military equipment has also diminished the appeal of Russian weaponry.) Indians may be happy to buy cut-price Russian oil, but they are even more pro-Western than those who grew up in the 70s.

What little soft power Russia did have — mostly the product of shared language and history, and necessarily confined to its immediate neighborhood — has been greatly undermined by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has also rendered hollow his invocation of Russian moral values.

And never mind taking the fight to the West, Putin may not even be able to win the cultural contest in his own backyard. Tellingly, the pro-Putin rapper and entrepreneur who took over the Starbucks franchise network are replacing it, not with Russian tearooms, but with a cheap knock-off of the original.

Putin’s Russia doesn’t even have the soft power of a Frappuccino.

More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:

• Putin and the Possibility of Defeat: Leonid Bershidsky
• Ukraine’s Wins Make Russian War More Dangerous: James Stavridis
• Europe’s Next Ukraine Mission Is on the Home Front: Editorial

Want more Bloomberg Opinion? Terminal readers, head to OPIN <GO>. Web readers, click here.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Bobby Ghosh at aghosh73@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

9. Time Is Running Out to Defend Taiwan

So is Ms Florunoy going to be the next SECDEF? She seems to be getting her policy views out there.

Excerpts:

To effectively prepare for the approaching window of vulnerability in which Xi may conclude he has the best chance of taking Taiwan by force, the Pentagon must do a better job of balancing its need to invest in long-term capabilities with what it needs today. In so doing, it can create an element of strategic surprise, a stronger deterrent, and a more modern force that combines traditional large weapons platforms with new and transformative capabilities. If the Pentagon fails to adopt a new vision of warfighting, and the PLA succeeds, the United States will find itself with plans and platforms to fight the last war instead of the one it may face next.

Xi has likely learned a dangerous lesson from Russia’s mistakes in Ukraine—namely, that if he wants to take Taiwan by force, he needs to go big and move fast. A potential conflict over the island could therefore unfold much more rapidly than the war in Ukraine, with China attempting to create a fait accompli within days. Therefore, the United States needs to dramatically strengthen deterrence and undermine Beijing’s confidence in its ability to succeed.

The U.S. Congress has already recognized the need to rapidly improve deterrence by funding the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which aims to provide the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command with the capabilities it urgently needs. The head of that command, Admiral John Aquilino, has repeatedly stated that he is most interested in additional capabilities that can be fielded in the next few years—not those that can be delivered decades from now.

The stakes could not be higher, and the clock is ticking. The United States is running out of time to deploy the new capabilities and operational concepts it needs to deter China in the near term. The Department of Defense still has time to make the necessary changes—but only if it acts with greater urgency and focus now.

Time Is Running Out to Defend Taiwan

Why the Pentagon Must Focus on Near-Term Deterrence

By Michèle Flournoy and Michael Brown

September 14, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Michèle Flournoy and Michael Brown · September 14, 2022

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it abundantly clear that “reunifying” Taiwan with mainland China is a legacy issue for him, something he intends to accomplish on his watch through political and economic means or, if necessary, through military force. Right now, he is preoccupied with the COVID-19 crisis, the slowing growth of the Chinese economy, and the upcoming 20th Party Congress, where he hopes to secure a third term as chair of the Chinese Communist Party. But once these immediate concerns are addressed, it is possible that sometime in the next five years Xi will consider taking Taiwan by force, either because nonmilitary efforts at reunification have fallen short or because he believes his chances of success will diminish if he waits and U.S. military capabilities grow.

The long-standing U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” deliberately leaves uncertain whether and under what circumstances the United States would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion. But it is clearly in the United States’ interest to deter China from attempting such an operation in the first place. As the scholar Hal Brands noted in a July report for the American Enterprise Institute, a Chinese assault on Taiwan that draws a U.S. military response is likely to ignite a long conflict that escalates beyond Taiwan. Like great powers that have gone to war in the past, the United States and China would grow more committed to winning as a conflict progressed, each making the case to its public that it has too much to lose to stop fighting. Given that China and the United States both have substantial nuclear arsenals, preemptively deterring a conflict must be the name of the game. To do so, the United States must help Taiwan modernize and enhance its self-defense capabilities while also strengthening its own ability to deter China from using force against the island.

The good news is that the Biden administration’s new National Defense Strategy, transmitted to Congress in March and due to be released in unclassified form in the coming months, reflects the need to move with greater speed and agility to strengthen deterrence in both the near and long term. The strategy reinforces the focus on a more aggressive China as the United States’ primary threat and emphasizes a new framework of “integrated deterrence,” drawing on all instruments of national power as well as the contributions of U.S. allies and partners to deter future conflicts that are likely to be fought across multiple regions and domains. It also identifies a number of technologies that will be critical for maintaining the U.S. military’s edge—including artificial intelligence, autonomy, space capabilities, and hypersonics—and calls for more experimentation to prepare for future warfighting. And it rightly aspires to bolster the United States’ military position in the Indo-Pacific and substantially deepen its relationships with important allies and partners.

But a critical piece of the deterrence puzzle is still missing: a focused Department of Defense-wide effort to dramatically accelerate and scale the fielding of new capabilities needed to deter China over the next five years. The Pentagon is developing both offensive and defensive capabilities that will take decades to design, build, and deploy. But emerging dual-use technologies are changing the character of warfare much faster than that. This is already evident in Ukraine, where commercial satellite imagery, autonomous drones, cellular communications, and social media have shaped battlefield outcomes. For example, satellite imagery created with synthetic aperture radar, which can see through clouds and at night, has provided a nearly real-time view of Russian movements, enabling Ukraine and NATO countries to counter Kremlin misinformation and sometimes giving Ukrainian forces a tactical advantage. Using this satellite imagery, drones have been able to collect valuable intelligence and serve as effective antitank weapons. Geolocation data has enabled the Ukrainian military to target Russian generals who carelessly used their cell phones. Cell phones have also enabled Ukrainians to document atrocities, while social media has bolstered the Ukrainian resistance and international support for its cause. Many technologies that were previously available only to governments are now readily available to individuals, including in countries that are hostile to the United States. To harness the power of these new technologies, the U.S. military must adopt new capabilities much more swiftly than it has in the past.

China—which leads the world in the manufacture of small drones and advanced telecommunications—already exhibits this sense of urgency. It compels its private companies to work closely with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to accelerate the development and adoption of new technologies and concepts. For decades, China has carefully studied U.S. capabilities, even stealing the designs for many major U.S. weapons systems. Now, it is rapidly modernizing the PLA, exploiting asymmetries between U.S. capabilities and its own in order to diminish Washington’s military advantage. It also makes use of innovations from its commercial sector. For example, the PLA uses commercially derived artificial intelligence technologies to power drone swarms and underwater autonomous vehicles. It also draws on leading private companies for electronic warfare tools, virtual reality technologies for training, and sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.

Although the Pentagon leadership deserves credit for strengthening U.S. strategy and enhancing U.S. force posture and activities in the Indo-Pacific region, the bottom line is that the U.S. military is simply not moving fast enough to ensure that it can deter China in the near term. If Washington wants to deny Beijing the ability to blockade or overrun Taiwan in the next five years, it must step up the pace and scale of change and adopt a new approach: relentless leadership and focus at the top of the Department of Defense to make deterring China a daily priority, immediate investments in rapidly fielding promising prototypes at scale, greater integration of commercial dual-use technologies, and an emergency effort to solve the most critical operational problems the United States would face in deterring and defeating a Chinese assault on Taiwan. Such a crash effort is not without precedent. Consider the Pentagon’s urgent endeavors to increase unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to counter terrorism after 9/11 and the rapid fielding of mine-resistant vehicles to protect U.S. troops from improvised explosive devices during the war in Iraq.

Planning for a blockade or invasion of Taiwan has long been the highest priority for the PLA, shaping everything from its acquisition priorities to its exercises to its military posture. This possibility has also motivated decades of Chinese investment in “anti-access/area-denial” capabilities designed to prevent U.S. forces from projecting power into the region to defend Taiwan. Many of the PLA’s new capabilities are now coming online at scale, significantly complicating the U.S. military’s operational challenges. Yet many of the U.S. military’s most promising capabilities to counter China in the event of a conflict over Taiwan will not be ready and fully integrated into the force until the 2030s. This creates a window of vulnerability for Taiwan, most likely between 2024 and 2027, in which Xi may conclude he has the best chance of military success should his preferred methods of political coercion and economic envelopment of Taiwan fail. Indeed, thanks to the PLA’s substantial investments, the U.S. military has reportedly failed to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in many war games carried out by the Pentagon.

NEED FOR SPEED

To deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan in the next two to five years, the United States must immediately reorient U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific. Acquisition processes that worked well for the United States during the Cold War are ponderous and leave the Pentagon ill-equipped to compete in a period of profound technological disruption against a faster-moving, more capable adversary than the Soviet Union. Coming from diverse backgrounds in the executive branch and private sector, we are united in our view of what needs to be done to provide the best deterrence against China and, if necessary, the best defense of Taiwan.

First, the Pentagon’s leadership must urgently address the gap between what the United States has and what it needs to deter China in the near term. With the commanders of the military’s geographic and functional combatant commands focused on current operations and the chiefs of the military services focused on building the capabilities they will need in the 2030s and beyond, the Department of Defense has no accountable senior leader solely focused on improving the United States’ ability to deter Chinese aggression in the 2024­–27 timeframe. Accordingly, the U.S. secretary of defense should create a senior civilian or general officer position that reports directly to him and has the singular mission of driving the changes necessary to achieve this objective. This official would need to have prior Pentagon experience, deep understanding of U.S. military operations, comfort with new technology, a reputation for driving change, and the resources and backing to create an empowered, effective, and collaborative team.

Job number one would be to lead an intensive, department-wide sprint to identify the most consequential problems associated with deterring an attack on Taiwan; determine which currently unfunded priorities should receive more resources (such as addressing critical munitions shortages); canvass the different branches of the military, the units of the Pentagon dedicated to innovation, and defense and commercial firms for solutions; and then work with leaders in Congress to reallocate funds to ensure these capabilities are fielded within the next two to five years. Success would be measured by the new capabilities deployed into the hands of U.S. warfighters and the speed at which this is done—not by the number of experiments and demonstrations that are performed.

The U.S. military’s most promising capabilities to counter China will not be ready until the 2030s.

One initial area of focus could be rapidly fielding large numbers of smaller autonomous systems to augment conventional capabilities at low cost. For example, small autonomous systems for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance could be deployed to create a vast and much more resilient sensor network that improves U.S. situational awareness across the Indo-Pacific. Similarly, swarms of small, AI-enabled expendable strike systems could be brought online, enabling U.S. forces to confound and overwhelm an adversary in any number of situations. Such off-the-shelf systems can be fielded quickly and cheaply with easy-to-upgrade software.

The United States could also improve its ability to hold Chinese naval forces at risk and thereby deter them from crossing the Taiwan Strait by arming U.S. bombers deployed to the Indo-Pacific with large numbers of long-range antiship missiles, as the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office has demonstrated. Urgently funding the scaling and deployment of such innovations should be among the Department of Defense’s highest priorities in the next two to five years, yet few have been fully funded in the most recent budget request. Ideally, some of these efforts could be undertaken jointly with the capable militaries of U.S. allies.

The Pentagon should also accelerate and scale up its security assistance to Taiwan, making the island more of an indigestible “porcupine” and improving its ability to slow down and impose costs on any aggressor. In particular, the United States should assist Taiwan with operational planning, war-gaming, and training while also helping Taiwan leverage commercial capabilities to improve its situational awareness and acquire critical asymmetric capabilities such as air and missile defenses, sea mines, armed drones, and antiship missiles. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan indicated at the Aspen Security Forum in July that planning for such an effort is already underway, but hardening Taiwan’s defenses in the two- to five-year time frame will require more hands-on, determined leadership to overcome persistent bureaucratic obstacles and delays. The Biden administration’s recent announcement that it will sell both Harpoon and Sidewinder missiles to Taiwan is a promising first step.

To augment current U.S. capabilities, the Department of Defense should adopt a “fast-follower” strategy to accelerate the adoption of commercial technologies that solve key operational problems. Private companies are leading the development of cutting-edge technologies such as AI and autonomous systems, so the Pentagon must be fast to follow these commercial innovators and make itself a more attractive customer by streamlining the acquisition process for commercial technologies. Deterring a Chinese assault on Taiwan, or defending against one, will require rapidly fielding a range of new capabilities from commercial dual-use suppliers. Commercial technologies such as advanced secure communications, AI software, small drones, and synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery can deliver novel capabilities at a fraction of the cost of technologies developed to meet military requirements and specifications—and in one to two years instead of one to two decades. Accelerating the early adoption of commercial technologies such as these will help the Pentagon erode Beijing’s confidence in its ability to take Taiwan by force.

FOLLOWING FAST

Instituting a fast-follower strategy would require overhauling the Pentagon’s outdated, cumbersome, and painfully slow procurement processes to deal more efficiently with commercial technology vendors. Currently, the department spends years developing detailed specifications for nearly every capability that it procures—whether or not that capability is already available off the shelf. And if a system does not meet a specified military requirement, finding funding to buy it from a commercial vendor can be difficult, even if it clearly meets a priority operational need. Given the urgency and gravity of the challenge posed by China, the Pentagon must innovate to dramatically speed up the procurement process for commercial technologies.

To that end, the Pentagon should designate units that can assess, budget for, and procure specific commercial capabilities such as small drones and counterdrone capabilities that are not designed with a specific branch of the military in mind. Doing so will require training a new cadre of acquisition professionals who specialize in the rapid procurement and integration of commercial technologies. It will also require keeping pace with private-sector innovation so that U.S. warfighters can be outfitted with the latest technology.

These Pentagon procurement units should follow commercial best practices, maximizing competition among vendors while also minimizing the costs for vendors to participate. The Defense Innovation Unit, which works to accelerate the adoption of commercial technology, already exclusively uses these practices, drawing an average of 43 vendors to each of its 26 competitive solicitations last year. Using a special authorization from Congress known as Other Transaction Authority, the Department of Defense can also eliminate requirements for vendors to recompete for contracts once they have successfully competed with a prototype; these vendors could proceed immediately to follow-on production contracts to scale the new capability.

Finally, the Pentagon should deepen its collaboration with U.S. allies in procuring critical capabilities, sourcing commercial technology from these countries, and selling proven technologies to their militaries. Prevailing in its competition with China will require the United States to innovate beyond its borders and collaborate with allies to field joint capabilities. The easiest, fastest way to do this is with commercial technologies that are unclassified and therefore easily shareable, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated.

NOW OR NEVER

Many analysts will say that the Department of Defense is already modernizing the U.S. force and investing in technology and innovation to compete with China. And it is true that the Pentagon is moving in the right direction. But it must make bigger changes—and faster. Most of the department’s investments in research and development will not yield fielded capabilities in the two- to five-year period that is critical for deterring China.

To effectively prepare for the approaching window of vulnerability in which Xi may conclude he has the best chance of taking Taiwan by force, the Pentagon must do a better job of balancing its need to invest in long-term capabilities with what it needs today. In so doing, it can create an element of strategic surprise, a stronger deterrent, and a more modern force that combines traditional large weapons platforms with new and transformative capabilities. If the Pentagon fails to adopt a new vision of warfighting, and the PLA succeeds, the United States will find itself with plans and platforms to fight the last war instead of the one it may face next.

Xi has likely learned a dangerous lesson from Russia’s mistakes in Ukraine—namely, that if he wants to take Taiwan by force, he needs to go big and move fast. A potential conflict over the island could therefore unfold much more rapidly than the war in Ukraine, with China attempting to create a fait accompli within days. Therefore, the United States needs to dramatically strengthen deterrence and undermine Beijing’s confidence in its ability to succeed.

The U.S. Congress has already recognized the need to rapidly improve deterrence by funding the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which aims to provide the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command with the capabilities it urgently needs. The head of that command, Admiral John Aquilino, has repeatedly stated that he is most interested in additional capabilities that can be fielded in the next few years—not those that can be delivered decades from now.

The stakes could not be higher, and the clock is ticking. The United States is running out of time to deploy the new capabilities and operational concepts it needs to deter China in the near term. The Department of Defense still has time to make the necessary changes—but only if it acts with greater urgency and focus now.

• MICHÈLE A. FLOURNOY is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of WestExec Advisors and Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for a New American Security. From 2009 to 2012, she served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.
• MICHAEL A. BROWN is a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2018 to 2022, he served as Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Foreign Affairs · by Michèle Flournoy and Michael Brown · September 14, 2022

10. Don’t Just Applaud Ukraine’s Counteroffensive. Time to Send More Weapons

Excerpts:

Finally, decision-makers should not ignore the over 6,300 relevant Russian- or Soviet-origin weapon systems currently in the possession of non-NATO countries, some of which could be transferred to Ukraine. Even just spare parts for those systems would be invaluable for Ukraine as it strives to maintain its own Soviet-made (and captured Russian) equipment. Washington and its allies should also continue working to secure 152mm and 122mm rounds for Ukraine’s Soviet-made artillery, even as Ukraine transitions to NATO-standard 155mm artillery rounds.

Ukrainians have demonstrated both the will and the ability to take back their territory. They have the bravery, skill, and determination necessary to defeat Putin’s invasion. The only question is whether the West will provide Kyiv with the weapons necessary to finish the job.

Don’t Just Applaud Ukraine’s Counteroffensive. Time to Send More Weapons

19fortyfive.com · by Bradley Bowman and Ryan Brobst · September 14, 2022

The Ukrainian counteroffensives around Kharkiv and Kherson have erased months of Moscow’s territorial gains and destroyed or captured large amounts of Russian military equipment, ammunition, and personnel. These operations demonstrate that Kyiv has the political will and military capability to seize the initiative and retake occupied territory when armed with weapons from the United States and its allies.

To defeat Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, reduce the duration and humanitarian costs of the war, and advance core Western economic and security interests, now is not the time to sit back and simply admire the performance of Ukrainian forces. Washington and its allies should urgently redouble efforts to provide Ukrainians with the necessary weapons.

On August 29, Ukraine announced a counteroffensive in the country’s southern Kherson Oblast, aiming to liberate a key city by the same name. After imperiling Russian frontline positions by striking supply depots and bridges for weeks, a spokesperson from Ukraine’s southern command said Ukrainian forces had advanced tens of kilometers in Kherson Oblast and Russian forces had retreated to their second line of defenses. The Pentagon confirmed that Ukraine has made forward progress and that some Russian units have fallen back as a result.

Then, on September 6, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast, benefiting from Russia repositioning some of its forces closer to Kherson in anticipation of a Ukrainian counteroffensive. While the battle is still underway and details are hazy, Ukrainian forces have smashed through Russian lines and retaken almost 3,800 square kilometers of territory since September 6, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. Ukrainian forces have entered the strategic city of Izyum, the key logistical hub of Kupyansk, and dozens of other towns.

In Kharkiv Oblast, Russian forces beat a hasty retreat, leaving behind large quantities of equipment and ammunition, even as Russian state media struggles to put a positive spin on events.

These developments prove that Kyiv has the political will and military forces with the tactical and operational acumen to retake occupied Ukrainian territory. Arguments that Ukraine is too outmatched to go on offense or that Western aid won’t make a difference are increasingly being undermined by reality on the ground.

In determining the path forward in terms of support for Ukraine, it is important to recognize that the stakes in Ukraine are incredibly high for Europeans, Americans, and other democratic allies and partners far from the war itself. Russia is attempting to use military force to redraw international borders. A similar “might makes right” impulse helped spark two world wars in Europe in the last century. If Putin’s gambit succeeds, we should expect more aggression on the continent from the Kremlin and other autocrats elsewhere.

Beijing, in particular, is watching to see how the U.S. and Europe will respond in both the short and long term to Putin’s invasion. We should expect the Chinese Communist Party to draw relevant lessons for prospective aggression against Taiwan. To deter additional aggression in Europe and shift Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis in the Taiwan Strait, the United States and like-minded democracies must continue to provide Kyiv with the means to defeat the Russian invasion soundly.

Nevertheless, some are questioning whether the United States can afford to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs. According to the Pentagon, the United States has committed more than $14.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine since February 2022.

That is certainly not a small amount of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. The Biden administration requested $773 billion for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2023. In comparison, the $14.5 billion allotted to Ukraine since February represents less than 1.9 percent of that amount.

When one considers the benefits for Americans associated with helping Ukraine defeat Putin’s invasion, that investment looks like a bargain. Cutting future military support for Kyiv would be penny wise and pound foolish.

For these reasons, instead of simply applauding the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the United States should continue providing military aid to Ukraine, focusing on the weapons and capabilities most needed to support Kyiv’s efforts to liberate and hold Ukrainian territory. This aid should include more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) as well as the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rounds they fire. Kyiv has reportedly requested an additional 2,000 of these munitions.

Additionally, providing the Army Tactical Missile System, a longer-range missile fired from HIMARS, would allow Kyiv to strike key Russian logistics nodes and other high-value targets within Ukrainian territory far beyond the range of Ukraine’s current precision-strike capabilities.

TOS-1 firing in Ukraine. Image Credit: Russian Military.

Finally, decision-makers should not ignore the over 6,300 relevant Russian- or Soviet-origin weapon systems currently in the possession of non-NATO countries, some of which could be transferred to Ukraine. Even just spare parts for those systems would be invaluable for Ukraine as it strives to maintain its own Soviet-made (and captured Russian) equipment. Washington and its allies should also continue working to secure 152mm and 122mm rounds for Ukraine’s Soviet-made artillery, even as Ukraine transitions to NATO-standard 155mm artillery rounds.

Ukrainians have demonstrated both the will and the ability to take back their territory. They have the bravery, skill, and determination necessary to defeat Putin’s invasion. The only question is whether the West will provide Kyiv with the weapons necessary to finish the job.

Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and previously served as national security advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Ryan Brobst is a research analyst at FDD.

John Hardie, Deputy Director of FDD’s Russia Program, contributed to this article.

19fortyfive.com · by Bradley Bowman and Ryan Brobst · September 14, 2022

11. The Unkept Promises of Western Aid

How much carbon does cooking the book generate? (apologies for the snarky comment and attempt at humor)

Excerpts:

Even with generous accounting, the OECD has indicated that total climate finance delivered by 2020 amounted to $83.3 billion, well short of the $100 billion target. Assessments show the United States is by far the biggest laggard in its provision of climate finance, mustering just $2.3 billion toward the $100 billion target in 2019. A recent independent assessment concluded that, using “fair share” calculations based on the size of its economy and its current and cumulative emissions, the United States should be contributing between $40 billion and $47 billion per year.

Developing countries have consistently called for the donor community to address this glaring shortfall, but even that would not be enough. Compared with the scale of the need today and to the role industrialized economies have played in creating the climate crisis, $100 billion per year is much less than the damage that the emissions of OECD countries have caused and will cause mainly for developing countries—estimated at least $15 trillion so far. In the Paris agreement of 2015, wealthy donors committed to a new climate finance target that would rise from a floor of $100 billion per year, starting in 2025. The process to agree on that new target, which begins in earnest at the annual UN climate conference in Egypt this autumn, offers an opportunity to design a commitment that genuinely brings in new, additional finance to deal with climate change, clearly stipulates how donors must measure that finance and aid, and lays out which countries will be committing to those new targets. More fundamentally, it is also an opportunity for wealthy countries to finally accept and explain to their publics that they are accountable and, to use legal language, liable for the mounting “climate debt” owed to low-emission countries, embracing the likelihood of new material financial contributions in the coming decades to help developing countries weather the impacts of climate change.

The United States, the EU, G-7, and other developed countries face a fight for hearts and minds in the developing countries whose choices will dictate whether the world tilts in favor of authoritarian powers or democratic ones. For lower income countries, development finance is crucial in meeting their basic needs, responding to crises such as the ongoing global food price spike, and dealing with the long-term effects of climate change. If rich countries really believe in transparency, honesty, and fulfilling international obligations, as they claim to, they need to stop their petty accounting practices and make good on their promises.

The Unkept Promises of Western Aid

How Donor Countries Cook Their Books and Let Down the Developing World

By Ian Mitchell and Nancy Birdsall

September 14, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Ian Mitchell and Nancy Birdsall · September 14, 2022

As the world enters a new era of great-power competition, the United States and other high-income Western countries insist that they offer a more honest, open partnership with developing countries than do their rivals—especially China. They argue that freedom and democracy are the best pathways to development for low-income countries. They decry, for instance, Chinese investments and projects in sub-Saharan Africa as opaque, exploitative, and guilty of stoking corruption. And they trumpet the merits of the aid that many Western countries deliver to poorer ones.

But in truth, wealthy Western donor countries are not always honest about the assistance they provide. They find ways to exaggerate their real commitments through creative and dubious accounting practices meant to expand the definition of development-aid spending. And when it comes to the other category of assistance that wealthy countries owe to developing ones—finance to help the global South mitigate and adapt to climate change—rich countries fall egregiously short of what they have pledged, which is in turn tragically short of what poorer ones need.

These shortcomings on development aid and climate finance undermine the credibility of Western donors and hurt the United States and its allies in their competition with China for influence around the world. Moreover, they disguise meaningful deficits in the resources that developing countries need to make progress and address the climate crisis. To live up to its values and promises—and to not cede the field to China—the West must be honest and serious about its development-aid and climate-finance commitments.

COOKING THE BOOKS

Since 1960, Western donors under the aegis of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have agreed to a common definition of what counts as development aid. The committee now boasts 30 members, mostly wealthy Western states, but also including Japan and South Korea. In the interest of openness and learning from one another, these donors publish aid data to common standards and sponsor ongoing peer reviews of each other’s contributions. The committee works to support “the economic development and welfare of developing countries” and bases its rules on political consensus.

But new pressures are eroding the integrity of this approach. For one, many European countries have inflated their supposed development-assistance totals by including the funds they have spent domestically on receiving Ukrainian refugees. Under current definitions, that kind of accounting is allowed, but it makes aid budgets look far more generous than they actually are. The costs of hosting Ukrainian refugees will add an estimated $30 billion to apparent aid spending this year. If this were merely overreporting, it would be relatively benign. But several donors have chosen to cut real aid programs to fund refugees, in effect leading to a situation in which low-income countries are footing the bill for the hosting of Ukrainian refugees. As Western donors skimp on development aid, China, which is not a member of the OECD, has become a major provider of loans for public infrastructure in poor countries. In some developing countries, Chinese loans have eclipsed traditional Western aid and given China a political and diplomatic advantage.

Western donors have also agreed to other accounting schemes: counting unused vaccine donations (sometimes recorded above their actual cost); overstating the grant (or aid) element of subsidized loans to low-income countries; and counting the full cost of any debt relief when much of that total had already been reflected in higher borrowing costs paid by high-risk borrowers when the loan was issued. In addition, the donors are currently considering adding to their aid totals the value of any reallocation to developing countries of their recently acquired additional Special Drawing Rights; Special Drawing Rights are a reserve asset issued by the International Monetary Fund from time to time to bolster central banks’ foreign currency reserves. Advanced economies have no need of these additional reserves, and are considering reallocating some of them to developing countries or to special funds that could be set up at the IMF or at the multilateral development banks. Yes, such reallocations make eminent sense and would shore up market confidence in countries suffering pandemic-related debt distress and coping with the high import costs of food and energy because of the war in Ukraine. But counting such reallocations as aid is disingenuous since they carry no real fiscal cost.

Cooking the books in these ways has allowed wealthy countries in recent years to inflate their claims about how much aid they provide without increasing the amount of money they actually disburse. This year, the effect of this clever accounting is more pronounced than ever. Countries that are traditionally among the top aid donors as a proportion of their GDP, including Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, have cut back aid for poor countries to fund the costs of hosting refugees; but they can still report to the Development Assistance Committee and to voters at home that their overall aid spending has not declined at all. Samantha Power, the head of USAID, drew attention to this problem in July in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Unfortunately, today, when the needs are greatest, assistance budgets are either stagnating or they are being cut,” she said. “And some countries are rewriting the rules on what counts as development spending, to shield themselves from criticism as they cut funding.”

Donor countries exaggerate their real commitments through dubious accounting practices.

The G-7 group of countries has similarly stumbled with its recent promise of $600 billion for a Partnership for Global Infrastructure. The Partnership is meant to support investment in roads, energy, and other public infrastructure fundamental to long-term growth in low-income countries, seeking to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Unfortunately for this partnership, the pledged funds have yet to materialize. None of the initiative’s scant documentation provides any clues as to how the G-7 countries will raise $600 billion, merely suggesting that much of it will be “mobilized” from private sources. This language echoes the failed ambitions of a decade ago that development finance would go from “billions to trillions” with small amounts of public money somehow leveraging big doses of private finance. The G-7 may tout its munificence, but it has little to show for it.

This is not how the G-7 and OECD countries should want the rest of the world to see their generosity. The reputational damage of overcounting exceeds the benefit of tallying extra billions in aid (after all, there is no real domestic political cost to falling short in reaching aid targets: only five countries have met the long-standing UN target of providing 0.7 percent of gross national income in aid). In fact, the major Western donors have a reasonably positive story to tell. Their spending has doubled in real terms since 2000, rising from a historic low of 0.21 percent of gross national income in 2001 to around 0.3 percent for most of the 2010s, amounting to a reported $179 billion in 2021. Exaggerating at the margin only undermines trust in the donors and in the system over which they preside.

At home, the G-7 countries have rigorous independent statistical agencies, such as the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics, that define and measure economic quantities. They should apply the same independence to definitions of their international spending. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee could establish a new, independent statistical body that would review the current approach to measuring aid. Such an official body could also set up new measures of development-relevant spending on global public goods such as hosting refugees, peacekeeping and sea-lane security, public health research, and action on climate change. The 30 donor countries that are members of the committee could also invite independent experts from recipient countries to join the independent body; a sound starting point would be to include at least five recipient countries and the African Union, given that the greatest needs are in Africa.

U.S. leadership can make a difference in this area. Although the United States ranks poorly among donors in the quantity of development aid as a proportion of its GNI, it is the largest absolute provider of aid. The United States, with Power heading USAID, could persuade fellow Western donors of the importance of measuring aid with statistical integrity.

SERVICING THE CLIMATE DEBT

Western countries are not just inflating their development-aid commitments; they are also actively falling short in many areas. The unfulfilled promise Western countries made in 2009 to provide at least $100 billion per year in climate finance to developing countries is further undermining their credibility. The failure of donors, especially of the United States and the U.S.-led World Bank, to contribute sufficiently to this effort has become an embarrassment. And as with development aid, a range of third-party assessments have found that the funding claims of donors have widely exaggerated the transfers that have taken place.

Climate change is the biggest risk to the future of humanity. Industrialized nations have and are causing climate change with their emissions, while lower income countries are the most vulnerable and will suffer most of the damages, even though they have barely contributed to the crisis.

Since the Rio Earth summit in 1992, many governments have accepted the need for “climate transfers,” grants and loans from high-income countries to developing ones to help weather the effects of climate change and to hasten green investments in agriculture and energy—investments that are in everybody’s long-term interests. Traditional donor states first formally recognized this obligation in 2009, precipitating the current internationally agreed commitment on climate finance to ensure at least $100 billion of public and private transfers every year to developing countries. The $100 billion is meant to include both investments in efficient, long-term green technologies (that would curb greenhouse gas emissions, a policy emphasis known as “mitigation”) and support to help developing countries minimize and deal with the damage of climate change (otherwise known as “adaptation”). It is also meant to be on top of existing flows of long-term development aid.

Such was the promise that wealthy countries made over a decade ago. But again, these donors have taken the most generous possible approach to measuring their contributions: treating loans as equivalent to grants; almost certainly exaggerating the climate-related content of reported multilateral bank loans; counting commitments rather than actual disbursements; rebranding and redirecting existing aid to climate finance; and with recent estimates suggesting that only about half of the climate finance raised by donor countries went beyond traditional aid in 2018, ignoring the principle that climate finance should be raised in addition to—not instead of—development-aid funding.

Wildfires near Cape Town, South Africa, October 2017

Mike Hutchings / Reuters

The Indian government, commenting on a 2015 OECD report that assessed the progress donor countries had made in raising climate finance, famously argued that the $50 billion reported was in fact closer to $2 billion in cross-border flows. Oxfam currently estimates public climate financing is less than a third of the OECD’s reported number.

Even with generous accounting, the OECD has indicated that total climate finance delivered by 2020 amounted to $83.3 billion, well short of the $100 billion target. Assessments show the United States is by far the biggest laggard in its provision of climate finance, mustering just $2.3 billion toward the $100 billion target in 2019. A recent independent assessment concluded that, using “fair share” calculations based on the size of its economy and its current and cumulative emissions, the United States should be contributing between $40 billion and $47 billion per year.

Developing countries have consistently called for the donor community to address this glaring shortfall, but even that would not be enough. Compared with the scale of the need today and to the role industrialized economies have played in creating the climate crisis, $100 billion per year is much less than the damage that the emissions of OECD countries have caused and will cause mainly for developing countries—estimated at least $15 trillion so far. In the Paris agreement of 2015, wealthy donors committed to a new climate finance target that would rise from a floor of $100 billion per year, starting in 2025. The process to agree on that new target, which begins in earnest at the annual UN climate conference in Egypt this autumn, offers an opportunity to design a commitment that genuinely brings in new, additional finance to deal with climate change, clearly stipulates how donors must measure that finance and aid, and lays out which countries will be committing to those new targets. More fundamentally, it is also an opportunity for wealthy countries to finally accept and explain to their publics that they are accountable and, to use legal language, liable for the mounting “climate debt” owed to low-emission countries, embracing the likelihood of new material financial contributions in the coming decades to help developing countries weather the impacts of climate change.

The United States, the EU, G-7, and other developed countries face a fight for hearts and minds in the developing countries whose choices will dictate whether the world tilts in favor of authoritarian powers or democratic ones. For lower income countries, development finance is crucial in meeting their basic needs, responding to crises such as the ongoing global food price spike, and dealing with the long-term effects of climate change. If rich countries really believe in transparency, honesty, and fulfilling international obligations, as they claim to, they need to stop their petty accounting practices and make good on their promises.

• IAN MITCHELL is Co-Director of Development Cooperation in Europe and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development.
• NANCY BIRDSALL is President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Foreign Affairs · by Ian Mitchell and Nancy Birdsall · September 14, 2022

12. Ukraine War Offers Clues to Future War, Joint Chiefs Chairman Says

Ukraine War Offers Clues to Future War, Joint Chiefs Chairman Says

Don’t expect any more tank columns massing on highways like sitting ducks.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

TEL AVIV, Israel—The future of warfare will look smaller, faster, more urban, and more precise than many Western military planners are anticipating, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told military officers from more than 22 nations here on Wednesday.

The notion that wars will increasingly be fought in cities is neither new nor universally accepted, but Milley said the conflict in Ukraine shows urban warfare done both right (Ukraine’s defense of Kyiv) and wrong (Russia’s leveling of Mariupol).The point of urban warfare, Milley said, is to capture key physical infrastructure nodes and population centers. If you destroy the infrastructure and kill or expel the population, then you’ve destroyed the very thing you need to win.

“If you accept that war is the conduct of politics by violent means in order to impose your political will on your opponent…then it stands to reason that politics is all about people and power and the distribution of goods and services, etc, then it stands to reason that decision in war will occur where people are, where the distribution of goods and services” is, he said That means cities.

Better operations in such environments will make use of the growing precision and range of weapons, coupled with the growing abundance of digitally-sensed information from consumer electronics and other means, he said. Instead of capturing swaths of terrain, militaries will seek to control key infrastructure.

But he said most militaries have not been “optimized” to fight in cities. “In fact, we've been taught: don't, you know, go into urban areas, because it's highly consuming,” he said.

The ubiquity of sensed information, often emerging directly from people’s phones onto social media, will also make every target easier to see and hit. In the leadup to Russia’s invasion, Milley said, there were “young people in their 20s, running around with iPhones, [collecting and sharing] videos of Russian forces massing on the Ukrainian border. Those weren't spies—Ukrainian spies, American spies, French or British spies. Those were just citizens out there with cameras taking videos of Russian mechanized vehicles, infantry fighting vehicles and tanks, driving down roads, going to assembly areas, etc.”

All this information made it easy to deduce Russia's intent, the size of its force, and its possible attack routes.

In a world of ubiquitous sensors, militaries must move away from large, conspicuous force deployments toward smaller units that change location rapidly and don’t attract notice.

“Your concealment, the size of your force, and the speed at which you move around a battlefield will contribute directly to your survivability on a future battlefield that is highly lethal,” Milley said.

Perhaps the most important lesson to come out of the war for future military planners is that small unit commanders and non-commissioned officers must be empowered by their superiors to make more decisions themselves rather than rely on higher authorities elsewhere.

“You're seeing a very different type of leadership coming out of the Ukrainian military…at the small-unit level, tactical level, but also at the operational and strategic level,” he said, and it’s a key to Ukrainian success.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

13. Ukraine faces ‘tough fight’ even as some Russian forces retreat, says US

This would be a game changer.

Excerpt:

A senior US defence official said Washington and its allies are discussing Ukraine’s longer-term needs, such as air defences, and whether it may be appropriate to give Kyiv fighter aircraft in the “medium to longer term”.

Ukraine faces ‘tough fight’ even as some Russian forces retreat, says US

Financial Times · by Felicia Schwartz · September 12, 2022

Ukraine still faces “a tough fight” after Russia gave up most of the territory it had taken near Kharkiv following a lightning counteroffensive that forced many of its retreating troops to leave the country, according to the Pentagon.

A senior military official said on Monday that the Russian military “had largely ceded their gains” around Ukraine’s second-largest city and had “withdrawn to the north and the east”, adding that “many of these forces have moved over the border into Russia”.

The Pentagon’s assessment comes as US officials expressed cautious optimism about the Ukrainian counter offensive while warning the rapid advances had not yet fundamentally changed the near-term outlook on the battleground.

“This continues to be a tough fight for the Ukrainians,” the official said. “Our focus will be to continue to work closely with the Ukrainians and the international community to provide them with the support that they need as they push back on the Russian invaders.”

Some western officials have been emboldened by Ukraine’s progress, saying that its recent advances have bolstered the case for Nato countries and partners to continue to provide it with lethal aid.

The US is aware of reports that Russian forces abandoned equipment as they retreated, “which could be indicative of Russia’s disorganised command and control”, the official added.

A senior US defence official said Washington and its allies are discussing Ukraine’s longer-term needs, such as air defences, and whether it may be appropriate to give Kyiv fighter aircraft in the “medium to longer term”.

Ukrainian military officials have said they have reclaimed more than 3,000 square kilometres of terrain in what has become Moscow’s biggest military setback since it was forced to scrap plans to take Kyiv and retreat from the country’s north in March.

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

Officials and analysts expect that Ukraine will continue to advance but that Russia may be able to take back some territory, adding that they did not expect progress to be linear.

Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, said it was up to Ukraine to detail its progress but added it was “clear they are fighting hard to defend their country and take back territory”. The US would “continue to support their need to succeed on the battlefield”.

She added that the White House was grateful to Congress “for the bipartisan support that has made it possible to provide Ukraine with unprecedented military, humanitarian [and] financial support” so far.

Jean-Pierre said the US and its allies “have worked to fulfil the Ukraine request for what they need to be successful on the battlefield — and that’s what we’re going to continue to do”.

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The US has committed much of the $40bn aid package for Ukraine that president Joe Biden signed in May, which was meant to last until the end of September. He has asked Congress for some $13bn more in assistance for the country, including lethal aid, and Washington is expected to announce another weapons package in the coming days.

The tentatively encouraging assessment from US officials comes after the Kremlin said it would press on with its invasion of Ukraine “until all the goals that were originally set are achieved”.

The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged its troops have pulled back in the Kharkiv region, but authorities have since avoided calling it a retreat.

On Monday, Ukrainian troops tried to consolidate the gains they have made since launching the offensive east of Kharkiv. In Izyum, a critical logistics hub where thousands of Russian troops had been stationed, Ukrainian soldiers hoisted the national flag over the central district government building in the main square.

Financial Times · by Felicia Schwartz · September 12, 2022

14. Ukraine Signals Major Weapons Request for Long-Term Offensive Against Russia

Will we provide ATACMS?

Excerpt:

Asked Friday why the U.S. remained reluctant to give Ukraine the ATACMS missiles, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. is committed to giving the Ukrainians what they need to beat back the Russian forces, but said, “It’s not just about one particular weapon or weapons system.”

Ukraine Signals Major Weapons Request for Long-Term Offensive Against Russia

List shared with U.S. lawmakers shows Kyiv wants longer-range missiles, which U.S. has declined to give

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-signals-major-weapons-request-for-long-term-offensive-against-russia-11662998386?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By Warren P. StrobelFollow and Michael R. GordonFollow

Updated Sept. 12, 2022 5:10 pm ET

WASHINGTON—Ukraine has signaled that it will make major new requests for weapons from the U.S. and its allies, including a long-range missile system Washington has declined to provide, as Kyiv presses a successful offensive that has reclaimed thousands of square miles from Russian forces.

A document shared with U.S. lawmakers and viewed by The Wall Street Journal lists dozens of types of armaments the Kyiv government says it will need to press its offensive into 2023.

Among them are the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which has a range of about 190 miles. The Biden administration, which has dispatched more than $15 billion worth of weapons and other security assistance to Ukraine, has declined to provide that system over concerns Ukraine could use it to strike Russian territory and spark a wider conflict with the West.

Ukraine’s list of requirements for “offensive operations” includes 29 types of weapon systems and ammunition. Among them are tanks, drones, artillery systems; more Harpoon antiship missiles; and 2,000 missiles for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, which the U.S. began providing earlier this year.

Watch: Strikes Hit Kharkiv as Ukraine Recaptures More Territory

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Watch: Strikes Hit Kharkiv as Ukraine Recaptures More Territory

Play video: Watch: Strikes Hit Kharkiv as Ukraine Recaptures More Territory

Strikes hit Kharkiv on Monday, a day after a blaze broke out at a power plant damaged by a Russian missile, causing blackouts in the region. As Ukraine recaptures more territory, rare criticism of Russia’s war tactics emerged on Russian state television. Photo: Juan Barreto/AFP

The request follows the publication of a new strategy statement by two senior Ukrainian military officers who argued a turning point in the war could come if the Ukrainians had longer-range systems, specifically mentioning the ATACMS.

Ukraine’s embassy in Washington and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. A senior State Department official Monday referenced the two security assistance packages for Ukraine announced last week, and said the U.S. would “continue to give them the support they need to succeed on the battlefield.”

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon on Monday, a senior defense official declined to say if any new type of weapons might be provided to Ukraine. Asked about sending tanks to Ukraine, the official said the U.S. doesn’t “have any specific plans about a specific capability at this point for that medium to longer” term.

An early version of the Army Tactical Missile System underwent testing in 2021 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

PHOTO: WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Ukraine’s requests come as its forces have routed Russian troops in northeastern Ukraine. The Kyiv government says it has taken back about 3,500 square miles of territory in the Kharkiv region.

Asked Friday why the U.S. remained reluctant to give Ukraine the ATACMS missiles, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. is committed to giving the Ukrainians what they need to beat back the Russian forces, but said, “It’s not just about one particular weapon or weapons system.”

“It’s about how you integrate these systems and how you integrate the efforts of various elements in the inventory to create effects that provide advantage to the Ukrainians,” he said in Prague alongside Czech Minister of Defense Jana Cernochova. “And we’re beginning to see that.”

Last week, Valeriy Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s force, and Mykhailo Zabrodsky, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and a senior military officer, wrote in a strategy statement that long-range missiles would give Kyiv a significant advantage in its counteroffensive. Russia has long-range cruise missiles that greatly outdistance the systems in the Ukrainian inventory, they stated.

“The only way to radically change the strategic situation is, without a doubt, for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to launch several consecutive, and ideally, simultaneous counterattacks during the 2023 campaign,” they wrote.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told the Journal in July that his country needs the ATACMS because Russia has longer-range multiple rocket launch systems. He said his country has “passed the test” with its successful use of Himars, which has a range closer to 40 miles.

Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.

Write to Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com

15. Assessment: How the U.S. and Europe Have Aided Ukraine and What Must Be Done

Conclusion:

There is much at stake for the U.S. and Europe in Ukraine. A fair assessment of the aid provided underscores how Europe can and should do more – however, their contributions have likely been underestimated on this side of the Atlantic. A free, prosperous, and secure Ukraine will only come about if Europe, Ukraine, and the U.S. each do their part.

Assessment: How the U.S. and Europe Have Aided Ukraine and What Must Be Done

19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Kochis and Tom Spoehr · September 14, 2022

The Biden Administration recently asked Congress for $13.7 billion in additional aid for Ukraine. Before Congress acts, it is worth taking stock of what has been done so far.

Without question, supporting Ukraine is in U.S. and European interests. Ukraine’s defense is countering the malicious actions of Russia and China, who would both benefit from the disorganized, divided, and distracted Europe that would emerge after a successful war against Ukraine.

Our assessment of aid to date is that U.S. and European contributions to Ukraine have been equitable. That said, a faster, more robust, and less risk-averse military aid program at the beginning of the conflict might have brought the war to a speedier conclusion. Furthermore, the U.S. and its allies need to be thinking now about how to best contribute to reconstruction efforts so as to ensure Ukraine’s long-term stability and successful governance.

Foreign Support is Crucial to Ukraine’s Survival

Ukraine would not be a free country today without foreign support. Since the end of August, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has liberated an area larger than the combined territory of Delaware and Rhode Island. This success shows what Ukrainian forces can do when they are properly equipped and trained. While U.S. aid has been substantial, the Europeans have made important contributions. Europe is providing stronger support to Ukraine than any quick snapshot of pledged aid will show. Let’s look at the numbers.

The U.S. has pledged just under €45 billion in total aid (financial, humanitarian, and military). The next closest donor is the European Union, which has pledged around €16 billion to Ukraine. The largest individual European donor nation is the United Kingdom, at just over €6 billion. While the contributions of other nations are smaller, when aid is viewed as a percentage of gross domestic product, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and the UK are all donating more bilateral aid than is the U.S.

It is also important to understand the difference between public commitments and actual deliveries of aid. In some instances – for example, budgetary support – the U.S. has fulfilled a smaller percentage of its commitments (46%) than other donor nations such as Canada (65%), France (54%), Germany (100%), Japan (100%), Sweden (100%), and the United Kingdom (56%) have, although those nations have pledged far smaller amounts. This is also true of weapons and equipment deliveries. The U.S. has delivered around 24% of its pledged commitments, whereas Poland has delivered 100%.

Moreover, not all deliveries of military aid are disclosed or made public. For a variety of reasons, some nations may choose to donate military equipment in secret, which is not accounted for in aid tabulations. Additionally, companies in some European nations such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland are helping repair damaged Ukrainian equipment and get it back onto the battlefield quickly. This support, too, is not captured in public reports.

More Than Meets the Eye

There are other costs born of the conflict. For example, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian refugees are fleeing to European nations. The number of Ukrainian refugees taken in by the U.S. equals only about 0.02% of our population. That proportion is far higher in places like the Czech Republic (3.62%), Estonia (3.30%), Poland (3.19%), Lithuania (2.07%), Latvia (1.81%), Montenegro (1.51%), Slovakia (1.47%), Bulgaria (1.22%), and Germany (1.04%).

Even in absolute numbers, the U.S. has taken in far fewer Ukrainian refugees (100,000) than Poland (1,365,810), Germany (1,003,029), the Czech Republic (427,696), Italy (159,968), Turkey (145,000), Spain (140,391), and the UK (122,900). This is actually right and appropriate. It is far better for Ukrainians to be hosted by nations closer to their homes, easing their eventual resettlement in Ukraine. Still, it’s important to recognize the leadership many European nations have shown on this issue.

The cost of housing Ukrainian refugees is significant. The Kiel Institute estimates that, for some nations, these costs exceed their bilateral aid to Ukraine. When refugee costs are added to overall aid to Ukraine, Estonia, just to take one example, is spending more than 1.2% of GDP, and Latvia and Poland also exceed 1%.

Europeans also bear hidden costs of Russia’s aggression. For example, those nations nearest Ukraine have seen their vital tourism industries flattened. Europe is also paying a heavy price – financially and politically – for decades of ill-considered policies that have left them heavily reliant on Russian energy. Energy price hikes due to the war are hitting European consumers and businesses far harder than anything we’ve experienced.

Shaping a Resilient Ukraine

Overall, it’s also fair to say that some topline views of European aid underestimate the contributions of European countries, as well as the level of societal commitment. Nevertheless, the United States is undisputedly the largest and most significant donor country. Additionally, the terms of U.S. grants vs. loans are usually more generous than those of the European Union.

Supporting Ukraine must be a joint transatlantic undertaking, but Europe can and should do more.

The U.S. and its allies should also be thinking now about the longer-term challenge: how to fund reconstruction efforts in ways that contribute to an independent, resilient, and self-reliant Ukraine. “At present,” argues aid expert Max Primorac, “there is high risk that the Ukraine reconstruction effort will be highjacked by the self-interested aid industry and lock the country into debilitating aid dependency, eventually eroding the country’s resilience.” To best serve Ukraine, as well as U.S. and European taxpayers, reconstruction dollars and euros should be accompanied by associated property, regulatory, and judicial reforms.

Looking forward, the U.S. and Europe should seek opportunities to leverage private capital to help in the massive eventual challenge and opportunity of rebuilding Ukraine. The Three Seas Initiative (3SI) is one vehicle that should not be overlooked. 3SI seeks to attract private capital into the region by attracting market-driven investments into digital infrastructure, energy, and transportation. Further, the U.S. and other governments should discard traditional forms of aid monopolized by international financial institutions and the aid-industrial complex.

If the U.S., the Europeans, and the Ukrainian government don’t start thinking harder and better about winning the peace, a successful end to the war may be a hollow victory.

The future of Ukraine is being shaped every day by the bravery, skill, and sacrifice of Ukrainian forces on the ground. It will also be impacted by those thinking through how to rebuild the nation in a way that sets it on the path to prosperity and success.

Image of Ukraine attacking Russian tank. Image Credit: Twitter Screenshot.

There is much at stake for the U.S. and Europe in Ukraine. A fair assessment of the aid provided underscores how Europe can and should do more – however, their contributions have likely been underestimated on this side of the Atlantic. A free, prosperous, and secure Ukraine will only come about if Europe, Ukraine, and the U.S. each do their part.

Daniel Kochis is a senior policy analyst for European affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. He specializes in trans-Atlantic security issues, regularly publishing on U.S. policy in Europe, NATO, U.S.-Russia relations, and Arctic issues. Kochis is also a regional author for the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of U.S. Military Strength.

Thomas Spoehr serves as director of Heritage’s Center for National Defense where he is responsible for supervising research on matters involving U.S. national defense. Prior to joining Heritage, Spoehr served for over 36 years in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Lieutenant General. He is an expert on national defense policy and strategy, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on defense strategy, budgets and equipment modernization. Spoehr’s articles and commentary have been published widely in both civilian and military media and he is often called upon to provide expert commentary and analysis.

19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Kochis and Tom Spoehr · September 14, 2022

16. WITHOUT YOU (EU versus Disinformation)

From the website: EU Vs. Dinisfo (https://euvsdisinfo.eu/without-you/#) . Unattributed.

Graphics/meme at the link.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

WITHOUT YOU

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/without-you/#

Successful Ukrainian counteroffensive exposes cracks in Russian infosphere, but colonial attitudes and toxic hate speech still prevail inspiring more atrocities.

The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive(opens in a new tab) launched in the Kharkiv region has dominated the news recently. The rapid and decisive advance by the Armed Forces of Ukraine routed and in some cases decimated the Russian occupying forces, including some of their most ‘prestigious’ units(opens in a new tab), and returned most of Kharkiv Oblast to Ukrainian control.

As reports of the Ukrainian advances reached Russia and the Kremlin, Russian state-controlled disinformation outlets and their pundits seemed to be, at least initially, in a state of confusion and disarray regarding Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive.

Russian Ministry of Defence spokesperson Igor Konashenkov attempted to push a message of Russian forces ‘regrouping’(opens in a new tab) in the Kharkiv region, but even some of the staunchest supporters of the ‘Special Military Operation’ were unimpressed(opens in a new tab) and demanded a more honest appraisal(opens in a new tab) of the situation. Some commentators have asked hard-hitting questions(opens in a new tab) regarding the state of Russian forces and the money spent, and even engaged in debunking the official lines presented(opens in a new tab), comments which have invited thinly vailed threats of a crackdown(opens in a new tab) from the Kremlin.

Nevertheless, vocal public criticism of the conduct of the ‘Special Military Operation’ should not be mistaken as calling for peace or a voluntary withdrawal of troops from Ukraine. Instead, as we have reported before, hateful words pushing for genocidal actions(opens in a new tab) and war crimes(opens in a new tab) against Ukraine and its people are still commonplace among military bloggers and evening talk show pundits alike. Despite their humiliation on the battlefield at the hands of advancing Ukrainians, the Russian military is happy to comply with the requests, as evidenced by their most recent missile strikes against civilian infrastructure(opens in a new tab) in Ukraine.

To deflect blame, and to explain away the recent major military setbacks, pro-Kremlin propagandists use the age-old trick of blaming Western mercenaries(opens in a new tab) (also here(opens in a new tab)) and NATO troops(opens in a new tab) for their troubles, instead of having an honest look into the mirror. Even at times of rare honesty(opens in a new tab), blame is not assigned to the sitting Czar himself, but to the boyars that mislead him into the war, and to the Western world allegedly fighting on the battlefield against Russia.

As Ukrainian forces advanced, the Russian occupiers fled(opens in a new tab) on foot, bicycles, and at times in civilian clothes, leaving their heavy equipment behind. While Russian occupation forces in the Kharkiv region were being routed and fleeing for their lives, Muscovites celebrated their city under fireworks of different sorts. The Kremlin projected a sense of normalcy in the capital while Russian imperial ambitions were crumbling fast in Ukraine.

Not even a resemblance of normalcy is a given for Ukrainians. Reports(opens in a new tab) (see also here(opens in a new tab) and here(opens in a new tab)) emerging from the recently liberated regions paint an already all-too-familiar tale of horrific atrocities, not dissimilar to those that took place in Bucha, against the civilian population conducted by the occupying Russian forces. Not surprisingly, we are already witnessing a mushrooming pro-Kremlin disinformation(opens in a new tab) (see also here(opens in a new tab)) desperately trying to discredit the early findings.

No wonder that Ukrainians have decided to go, in President Zelenskyy’s powerful words, ‘without you(opens in a new tab).’ Similarly, also the European Union is working to sever toxic ties of influence, as referred to in yesterday’s State of the Union address by President von der Leyen(opens in a new tab).

Other disinformation narratives:

• Without Russian gas, Europe will slide back into the Middle Ages. Another example of a pro-Kremlin narrative targeting the impending energy crisis in Europe. This narrative plays into the Kremlin’s allegations that the West is about to collapse. By pushing such narratives, the Kremlin seeks to pressure and blackmail European governments and to create popular discontent over rising energy costs. Nevertheless, the Kremlin’s hopes for Europe’s imminent collapse due to an energy crisis appear to be highly premature. European Union member states have already conducted a number of preparatory actions(opens in a new tab) in anticipation of the coming winter, which third parties have confirmed(opens in a new tab) to be the right course of action in averting any escalating energy crisis.
• Ukrainian grain goes to Europe instead of poor and developing countries. As with many other food security-related disinformation cases, this claim that the EU is hoarding Ukraine’s food exports is demonstrably false, as the official United Nations Black Sea Grain Initiative statistics prove clearly otherwise(opens in a new tab) (see also their article(opens in a new tab)). This false allegation goes in line with the wider pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign that aims to blame Western countries for a global food crisis in reality engineered by Russia as part of its unjustified aggression against Ukraine.
• Putin is winning and Europe will have to ease sanctions on Russia, says Politico. Except that, well, Politico does not say that(opens in a new tab). This is a deliberate distortion of the original article, none of these sentences attributed to the Politico’s piece appear in the original story. Distorting articles published in Western media to make them appear as supporting pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives is a frequent technique of pro-Kremlin outlets. We have many examples of uses of such technique in our case repository, such as this recent one twisting a New York Times piece on sanctions.

17. Why The Russia-Iran Alliance Will Backfire: Whither Iran?

Excerpts:

For Khamenei, hatred of the United States trumps animosity toward Russia. In November 2015, he visited Moscow for the first time in more than a decade, nominally to attend a summit for gas-exporting countries. After a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Khamenei declared, “America’s long-term scheme for the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer interaction.” He praised Putin for “neutralizing [Washington’s] policy.” Putin was also affable. “We regard you as a trustworthy and reliable ally in the region and the world,” he told Khamenei.[31]Putin also looks to the future; he was the first world leader to call Ebrahim Raisi upon his win in the June 2021 presidential elections, a victory that many observers believe confirm his frontrunner status to replace Khamenei upon the aging supreme leader’s death.[32]

Still, centuries of Iranian distrust and hostility do not easily dissipate. Perhaps this is why, in June 2021, the Russian and Iranian foreign ministries agreed to waive visas.[33]Few countries allow Iranians such access, and the decline of the Iranian rial makes it increasingly expensive for those that do. But a desire to bolster tourism may not be the only basis for the agreement. There is likely hope at a more senior level that enabling Iranians and Russians to meet and mix might breakdown the hostility that overshadows Iranian public opinion of Russia and its aims.

While the JCPOA helped reinforce Khamenei’s flailing attempt to build a Russia-Iran strategic alliance, the drive by both Tehran and Moscow’s dictatorial regimes to cement an anti-U.S. alliance will backfire. Decades of official Islamic Republic hostility to the United States have not eroded and, indeed, likely may have encouraged a general friendliness by the Iranian public toward America. To try to push Russia upon the public will likely accelerate that trend while Moscow’s close association with an increasingly unpopular Khamenei and Raisi will reinforce Iranian public hostility toward Russia for decades to come. The nature of dictatorship, however, means that in the short term, such sentiments will not affect policy as both Tehran and Moscow work to erode the post-World War II liberal order and U.S. dominance on the regional and global stage.

Why The Russia-Iran Alliance Will Backfire: Whither Iran? – Analysis

eurasiareview.com · by Middle East Quarterly · September 15, 2022

By Michael Rubin*

For all its talk of leading a “resistance front,” the Islamic Republic of Iran has historically had few allies. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led his revolutionaries, “Neither East nor West but Islamic Republic” was a foundational slogan of the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini also described the United States and Russia as being “two blades of the same scissors.”[1] He meant it: While the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran symbolized the Islamic Republic’s hostility toward the United States and its European allies, Khomeini was equally distrustful of the Soviet Union and its eastern bloc satellites. Iran’s isolation was cemented when every Arab state with the exception of Syria sided with Iraq during their 1980-88 war. Tehran’s ties with Damascus have remained tight, but Syria’s influence is limited inside the Middle East and its diplomatic weight is nonexistent outside it. The Iranian authorities sought to cultivate African states and were able to purchase the occasional vote on an international body, but Tehran’s declining resources limited its success.

Today, that isolation is over. Whereas Khomeini was wary lest Moscow take advantage of Iran’s vulnerability, Ali Khamenei, who succeeded him in 1989, took the risk to align with Russia in pursuit of a broader, anti-U.S. agenda. In this, he found success. But, the question for Iranians is, at what cost?

Distrust Centuries in the Making

Iranian leaders were aware of Russia by the fifteenth century as many European traders, seeking to bypass the Ottoman Empire on their overland journeys into Asia, traveled to Persia via Moscow.[2] Iranians worried little about their distant neighbors to the north: they viewed Russians as illiterate and cultureless peasants and worried more about Uzbeks and the independent khanates of the Central Asian steppes, which occasionally raided into Iran. The Russians were equally uninterested in the Persians. Russian tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) withdrew Russian troops from the Caspian coast, believing Iranian forces posed little threat.

Such neglect would be short-lived. In 1796, Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96) sent a 50,000-strong force into the North Caucasus, which at that time was part of Iran. Her death gave Iran a reprieve and saved it from what might have been a far greater conquest.

As the Russians conquered more territory in Asia, British leaders grew increasingly concerned about the security of India and, by extension, Iran, which had become the only power separating Russia from India. It was this fear that led London to first dispatch an ambassador to the shah’s court in 1800. Both the Russians and the French soon followed suit.

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It was not long before disputes between Moscow and Tehran resumed. Between 1804 and 1813, Iranian and Russian forces fought repeatedly in the Caucasus. The campaigns drained the shah’s treasury and, in the end, the Russians forced him to cede much of what today is the Republic of Azerbaijan and eastern Georgia. Resentment simmered, and in 1826, the Iranians attacked Russia to regain what the shah had lost. The gamble failed and, in the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchai, the shah ceded much of Armenia. For Iranians, these were not some peripheral territories but rather part of the heartland and the territory over which the crown prince would serve as governor. In 1829, an Iranian mob sacked the Russian embassy in Tehran, slaughtering its thirty-seven Russian diplomats.[3] Russia became a favorite bogeyman for both nationalists and clergy, and Russians in Iran suffered occasional mob violence over subsequent decades.[4]

Still, the Russian government saw commerce as a source of influence and encouraged businessmen to move to Iran. Russian leaders, like their British competitors, also sought to further their leverage with debt traps: Both powers would tempt the shah with loans to fund his profligate lifestyle but then call in their extortionate terms, the expense of which the shah would often pass to his subjects. This led to a pattern in which the Russian rulers often successfully wooed the shah while Iranian public opinion continued to harden against them.

The Twentieth-century Unrest

The twentieth century’s first decade was a time of upheaval in both Russia and Iran. First, the Japanese defeated Russia in war, ending Moscow’s image of invincibility. Then, first in St. Petersburg and then across Iran, revolutionaries successfully won parliamentary constraints on monarchies. In Iran, Muzaffar ad-Din Shah conceded to a constitution just five days before his death. His successor, Mohammed Ali Shah, was unhappy to see what he believed to be his birthright diluted before he could even take power. He quickly turned to Russia where Tsar Nicholas II also sought to preserve his traditional powers.

As the shah worked to consolidate power and roll back reforms, the Russian government worked to cement its position in Iran. Mohammed Ali Shah continued the practice of tax farming and office selling, so Russian officials used their resources to ensure pro-Russian candidates won advantageous positions, much to the chagrin of more liberal Iranian nationalists in Tehran’s new parliament.[5]

The 1907 Anglo-Russian convention divided Iran into spheres of British and Russian influence. An editorial cartoon of the time depicts the Russian bear sitting on Persia while the English lion looks on.

The Russians were blatant in their disrespect of Iranian sovereignty. On August 31, 1907, they shocked Tehran when they, alongside their British competitors, unveiled the Anglo-Russian convention, which effectively divided Iran into spheres of influence. While Iranians remained angry at both parties for the affront, Britain’s main strategic interest at the time was its telegraph lines across southern Iran, and so it ceded most major Iranian population centers to Russian control. Here, the Russians chafed the population more, using proxies and pressure to force closure of Iran’s nascent civil society groups and secret societies and to impose broader censorship on Iran’s exploding newspaper scene.

Even the affront of Russia’s secret agreement to divide Iran into different spheres did not break Mohammed Ali Shah’s tilt toward Russia. His ambitions were too great and so, in December 1907, he made his move against the Iranian Constitutionalists. His guards—and a detachment of Russian-trained Persian Cossacks—surrounded the parliament. Parliament’s supporters resisted and soon Iran was on the brink of civil war. As far as most Iranians were concerned, there were two sides: nationalists and Russian-backed Iranian autocrats. That perception largely remains unchanged today. Fighting erupted in July 1909 and, within two weeks, it was over. The shah and his retinue fled first to the Russian embassy and then to Russia itself. The nationalists put Ahmad, the shah’s 12-year-old son, on the throne. Still, Mohammed Ali Shah did not give up. Two years later and, again with Russian support, he invaded Iran from the north. He failed, but the episode cemented Russia’s reputation inside Iran as hostile to Iranian sovereignty.

During World War I, Russian forces drove south from the Caspian Sea reaching as far south as Qom. By 1917, British and Russian forces had occupied most of Iran, leaving Mohammed Ali Shah as a titular leader. Grievance went beyond bruised pride. During World War I, Iran lost more than 20 percent of its population to disease, famine, and violence.

The Bolshevik Revolution did not change the uneven power dynamic. In 1921, the Soviet authorities imposed a new treaty on Iran in which Moscow renounced earlier agreements and forgave Russian loans but also reserved the right to intervene should Iran host forces intent on interfering in the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities interpreted this literally and, within weeks, Moscow demanded that Tehran expel all Germans. Joseph Stalin would repeatedly cite the treaty to justify Soviet ultimatums. Indeed, Stalin used the 1921 Treaty to justify invading Iran two decades later. The Soviets were not alone in this—British and subsequently U.S. forces took part—but the Red Army was alone in refusing to leave Iranian territory when World War II ended. Not only did Iranian Azerbaijan become the focal point of the first Cold War crisis, but Moscow also sought to encourage and support Kurdish separatism in the Mahabad Republic in northwestern Iran. This was high among the reasons why Tehran tripled its defense budget in the next decade and joined the Baghdad Pact.[6] The direct military threat the Iranians felt from across their 1,100-mile border with the Soviet Union loomed large in public consciousness through the remainder of the Cold War. This is why, even as Ayatollah Khomeini railed against “The Great Satan” America during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, his suspicions and those of his followers remained just as deep toward the Soviet Union.[7]

Reconsidering Russia

While Khomeini did not waiver on his connection to Russia throughout the Iran-Iraq war despite the isolation Tehran faced, toward the end of his life, he signaled Iran’s need not to treat the Soviet Union with the same enmity as the regime did the United States. In May 2009, Hassan Rouhani, at the time a former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and a member of the Assembly of Experts, spoke at a roundtable on “Iran, Russia, and the West.”[8] While critical of Moscow’s posture toward Iran prior to the Islamic Revolution, he suggested then-parliamentary speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s 1989 visit to Moscow had laid the foundation for a new partnership.[9]

Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, continued Tehran’s quiet outreach justified on shared enmity with the Russians toward Washington and on economic opportunism. Some Iranians raised questions about inherent ideological compromise, but regime officials tried to explain this away. In 2012, for example, a website affiliated with the supreme leader denied any parallels between the Palestinian plight and Muslim minorities in Russia or China. The difference, it said, was that Israel was alone in having “confiscated” Palestinian lands.[10] Other outlets acknowledged the problem but assured critics that Tehran continued to provide “emotional support” for the Chechens.[11]

That same year, however, Rafsanjani—by then a senior statesman—threw cold water on the comfort some Iranian officials felt about their anti-U.S. alliance with Russia even if he was credited with its revival. In an interview, he noted the constraints Russia felt from U.S. pressure and acknowledged, “Like Western countries, Russia is also concerned about Iran becoming a power by acquiring nuclear weapons.”[12] As president, however, Rouhani disagreed, arguing both that the growing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and the Caucasus and U.S. human rights advocacy provoked Russia enough to cause it to put other concerns aside.[13]

Other officials were less sure. In 2014, Behrouz Nemati, a conservative who represents Tehran in parliament, said that the history of Russo-Iranian relations demonstrates a tendency toward Russian subterfuge and warned Iranian leaders to be careful “shaking Russia’s hand.”[14]

In contrast to Rouhani, Rafsanjani suggested that Afghanistan remained a source of distrust between Tehran and Moscow rather than a catalyst for tighter ties. “The Soviet Union’s record on invading Afghanistan left a bad memory of Russians in Iranians’ minds,” he explained. “It is too often overlooked that the Islamic Republic’s relationship with Russia was formed in such an environment.”[15] Sadegh Kharrazi, Iran’s former ambassador to France, also cast doubt on a Russian gamble. “Historically, there is a national distrust in Iranians’ nature against Russia. We haven’t been harmed by Americans like we have been by Russians,” he argued.[16]This appears to be a common attitude among some senior Iranian diplomats. Ali Khorram, a former Iranian ambassador to China, wrote that Russia was not trustworthy. “The Russians are good to Iran as long as it is in their interest,” he explained, but “as soon as Americans and Western countries [court Russia], [the Russians] will turn their back to their commitments to the Islamic Republic of Iran. … History has shown whenever we have relied on them [Russians], they have immediately abandoned us,” he added.[17]

While Khamenei and later Rouhani may have been eager for ties to Moscow, Russia’s historical baggage in Iran continued to intrude. Both countries supported the same side in the Syrian civil war, and yet, when a Russian ship launched cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea into Syria that overflew Iranian territory, even sympathetic Iranians such as senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) reacted with outrage.[18]

Other Russian actions have antagonized ordinary Iranians. After Moscow provided its Iranian counterpart with technology to jam Persian-language broadcasts from diaspora stations, ordinary Iranians reacted with vitriol. Internet commentary submitted to the conservative daily Asr-e Iran webpage on the story included comments such as, “May God give Russia Death,” “Russia is the biggest jerk,” and “the Russian embassy is a nest of spies.”[19] Outside the constraints of the official press, Iranian bloggers let loose, questioning the value of alignment with a declining economic power and the stability of any alliance with Russia.[20] An Iranian doctoral student in Moscow, meanwhile, observed—correctly—that the Kremlin always acted in its own national interest, but Iranian proponents of the alliance somehow expected the Russians to act in Tehran’s national interest instead.[21]

Can Trade Overcome Distrust?

While Washington and its Middle Eastern allies may worry primarily about Russia-Iran military ties, the trade relationship between the two countries could potentially be broader. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia entered a deep, multi-year recession. At the time, Tehran was already heavily sanctioned and, after a series of executive orders issued by President Bill Clinton, soon became more so. Both Tehran and Moscow, however, found an outlet in the other. In 1995, for example, Russia’s Atomstroyexport became the chief contractor for the Bushehr nuclear program at a time when few countries wanted Russian nuclear assistance given the stigma of the Chernobyl disaster, and Iranian contracts were toxic for Western firms.

Still, initial optimism in Tehran that Russian trade might salvage Iran’s economy quickly faded. In 2012, Rafsanjani explained,

In the past quarter century … Iran and Russia have never been able to set and create a visible trade partnership. The most important commodity [oil] that Iran has to offer other countries is not attractive to the Russians, and many Russians commodities and technologies have always been the lowest priority for the Iranian side.[22]

Russian exports to Iran decreased by nearly two thirds, from $3.4 billion to $1.2 billion, between 2010 and 2013, while Iranian exports to Russia grew only modestly and remained under $500 million.[23] Nor did either country’s non-military trade with the other increase appreciably over the next decade.[24]

Even the arms trade did not fully reassure those in the Iranian government unsure about whether to trust Moscow. In 2007, Tehran agreed to purchase the S-300 system for $800 million. Prior to the development of the S-400, the S-300 was still Russia’s premier anti-aircraft missile system, and so the announcement of the deal was a high stakes affair. Soon, however, Iranians who expressed doubt about Russia’s reliability felt vindicated: Moscow suspended the sale under international pressure. The dispute carried on for another eight years with the Iranian government demanding a $4 billion breach of contract penalty against Russia’s Rosoboronexport. And while Tehran dropped the suit in 2015 when Rosoboronexport finally delivered the hardware, cynicism and doubt remained.[25]

Ironically, it was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), President Barack Obama’s signature Iran nuclear deal, that breathed new life into the Russia-Iran arms trade. In order to reach agreement, Obama agreed not only to end prohibitions on Iran’s military trade but also to provide a windfall for Tehran in terms of sanctions relief and enabling foreign investment. It was not long, for example, before Moscow agreed to license the manufacture of Russian tanks inside Iran.[26] The two countries likewise appear to be cooperating in the cyber sphere with drones, and, despite Russian president Vladimir Putin’s denials, with satellites as well.[27] That appears to be the tip of the iceberg.[28] Russia and Iran also increasingly hold joint military exercises, sometimes with Chinese participation.[29] The IRGC also frequently participates in Russia’s annual military games.[30]

Will the Russian-Iranian Alliance Last?

For Khamenei, hatred of the United States trumps animosity toward Russia. In November 2015, he visited Moscow for the first time in more than a decade, nominally to attend a summit for gas-exporting countries. After a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Khamenei declared, “America’s long-term scheme for the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer interaction.” He praised Putin for “neutralizing [Washington’s] policy.” Putin was also affable. “We regard you as a trustworthy and reliable ally in the region and the world,” he told Khamenei.[31]Putin also looks to the future; he was the first world leader to call Ebrahim Raisi upon his win in the June 2021 presidential elections, a victory that many observers believe confirm his frontrunner status to replace Khamenei upon the aging supreme leader’s death.[32]

Still, centuries of Iranian distrust and hostility do not easily dissipate. Perhaps this is why, in June 2021, the Russian and Iranian foreign ministries agreed to waive visas.[33]Few countries allow Iranians such access, and the decline of the Iranian rial makes it increasingly expensive for those that do. But a desire to bolster tourism may not be the only basis for the agreement. There is likely hope at a more senior level that enabling Iranians and Russians to meet and mix might breakdown the hostility that overshadows Iranian public opinion of Russia and its aims.

While the JCPOA helped reinforce Khamenei’s flailing attempt to build a Russia-Iran strategic alliance, the drive by both Tehran and Moscow’s dictatorial regimes to cement an anti-U.S. alliance will backfire. Decades of official Islamic Republic hostility to the United States have not eroded and, indeed, likely may have encouraged a general friendliness by the Iranian public toward America. To try to push Russia upon the public will likely accelerate that trend while Moscow’s close association with an increasingly unpopular Khamenei and Raisi will reinforce Iranian public hostility toward Russia for decades to come. The nature of dictatorship, however, means that in the short term, such sentiments will not affect policy as both Tehran and Moscow work to erode the post-World War II liberal order and U.S. dominance on the regional and global stage.

*About the author: Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor at the Middle East Quarterly. He is grateful for the support of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office in conducting the research for this article.

Source: This article was published by Middle East Quarterly.

[1] Sadullah Zarei, interview, “Russiyeh-e Putin Qabel Etemad Ast,” Javan Online, Oct. 18, 2015.

[2] Josafa Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini, Travels to Tana and Persia, Lord Stanley of Alderley, ed., William Thomas and S.A. Roy, trans. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1873).

[3] Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002), pp. 187-94.

[4] Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 82-3.

[5] Earl of Minto, Viceroy of India, to the India Office, Viceroy’s Camp, Apr. 15, 1907, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, File 4108, FO 371/305.

[6] Mark Gasriowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 112.

[7] For another view, see, Daniel Pipes, “Fundamentalist Muslims Between America and Russia,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1986.

[8] Aftab News (Tehran), May 19, 2016.

[9] Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1989.

[10] “‘Alet ‘Adam Muzagha’giri dar Barabar Chin va Rusiyeh beh Dalil Koshtar Musalmanan Chin va Chechen,” Student’s Query, Porsemani.ir (website associated with Khamenei’s office), Dec. 31, 2012.

[11] “Aya Hamayat Iran va Musulmanan Yeksan Ast?” Quds Online (Tehran), Apr. 27, 2016.

[12] Hashemi Rafsanjani, interview, “Shakal-e Mojavud-e Ravabat-e Iran va Russiyeh bar Mobana-ye Entekhab-e Estrategik Tehran Nabudeh Ast,” Iran-Russia Studies Institution, Tehran, Jan. 29, 2012.

[13] Aftab News, May 19, 2016.

[14] Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA, Tehran), Sept. 15, 2014.

[15] Rafsanjani, Jan. 29, 2012.

[16] Sadegh Kharrazi, “Rusiyeh va Iran Motahedan-e Istrategik Nistand,” irdiplomacy.ir (Tehran), Nov. 6, 2012.

[17] Tabnak News Agency (Tehran), Jan. 18, 2015.

[18] Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA, Tehran), Nov. 17, 2015.

[19] Asr-e Iran (Tehran), Oct. 26, 2011.

[20] “Divangi-ha-ye beh Jihan Asib Mirisand,” Free1. Mihanblog.com, Dec. 8, 2015; Jahangir Heidari, “Tahlili bar Monesabat Jomhhuri Islami Iran va Rusiyeh,” Andisheh-haye Zhiopolitik, Oct. 24, 2015

[21] Ahmad Vakhshiteh, “‘Ashq-e Rusha Nabayad Tarsid,” Ensaf News (Tehran), Apr. 5, 2016.

[22] Rafsanjani, Jan. 29, 2012.

[23] Mark Katz, “Iran and Russia,” Iran Primer, U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C., Aug. 2015.

[24] “Russia/Iran,” Observatory of Economic Complexity, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Mass.

[25] The Moscow Times, Nov. 9, 2015; BBC News, Apr. 17, 2016.

[26] ILNA, Apr. 30, 2016.

[27] Omree Wechsler, “The Iran-Russia Cyber Agreement and U.S. Strategy in the Middle East,” Council on Foreign Relations, Mar. 15, 2021; Defapress (Tehran), June 27, 2021; The Washington Post, June 10, 2021.

[28] Paul Goble, “Moscow and Tehran Dramatically Expanding Economic and Security Cooperation,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, The Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., June 3, 2021.

[29] Reuters, Dec. 27, 2019; Aljazeera TV (Doha), Feb. 16, 2021.

[30] Tasnim News Agency (Tehran), July 27, 2016.

[31] “Ayatollah Khamenei: US Plotting to Dominate West Asia,” Leader.ir, Tehran, Nov. 23, 2015.

[32] Samuel Ramani, “Russian-Iranian relations under Raisi and possible post-Khamenei scenarios,” Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C., July 7, 2021.

[33] Tasnim News Agency, June 7, 2021.

eurasiareview.com · by Middle East Quarterly · September 15, 2022

18. Women Still Unable to Break Glass Ceiling of Navy SEAL Qualifications

Are there dots to connect between this and the new Navy investigation of BUD/S?

Excerpts:

The spokesman added that two enlisted women were offered SEAL contracts -- a requirement to enter Naval Special Warfare but only one step on the way to becoming a SEAL -- in 2019 and 2020 and began training but left early in the process. The spokesman declined to say at what stage they left, citing the "integrity of Naval Special Warfare Center courses and the privacy of its candidates."

With the first women graduating from Army Ranger School in 2015 and the Defense Department opening all military occupational specialties and ratings to women in 2016, female troops have made inroads into nearly all areas of service.

Still, the special operations community, with its physical demands and high operations tempo, has remained elusive to female troops.

According to Navy Capt. Jason Birch, former commanding officer of SEAL Team 10, one woman serves as a Naval Special Warfare operator; three have graduated from the U.S. Army Special Operations Qualifications Course; the first female Green Beret graduated in 2020; and women have served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. The Air Force graduated its first first female special tactics officer in June.

But breaking the glass ceiling of the Navy SEALs has proven difficult.

Women Still Unable to Break Glass Ceiling of Navy SEAL Qualifications

military.com · by Patricia Kime · September 14, 2022

In the past three years, two women were selected to start the grueling process of becoming Navy SEALs, but neither made it, Military.com has learned.

During a meeting Sept. 13 of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, or DACOWITS, a Navy officer told the board that there were two women currently in the "pipeline" to become Navy SEALS -- one enlisted and one officer.

But when asked for clarification, a Navy Special Warfare Command spokesman said the officer misspoke. Instead, three female sailors are pursuing paths to become Special Warfare Combatant Craft Crewmen, and one officer is waiting for results from the SEAL Officer Assessment and Selection Board to determine whether she will be offered a SEAL contract.

The spokesman added that two enlisted women were offered SEAL contracts -- a requirement to enter Naval Special Warfare but only one step on the way to becoming a SEAL -- in 2019 and 2020 and began training but left early in the process. The spokesman declined to say at what stage they left, citing the "integrity of Naval Special Warfare Center courses and the privacy of its candidates."

With the first women graduating from Army Ranger School in 2015 and the Defense Department opening all military occupational specialties and ratings to women in 2016, female troops have made inroads into nearly all areas of service.

Still, the special operations community, with its physical demands and high operations tempo, has remained elusive to female troops.

According to Navy Capt. Jason Birch, former commanding officer of SEAL Team 10, one woman serves as a Naval Special Warfare operator; three have graduated from the U.S. Army Special Operations Qualifications Course; the first female Green Beret graduated in 2020; and women have served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. The Air Force graduated its first first female special tactics officer in June.

But breaking the glass ceiling of the Navy SEALs has proven difficult.

To date, 13 women have been chosen for Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman training, with one completing the course and becoming the Navy's first female Naval Special Warfare operator -- the boat operators who transport Navy SEALs and conduct their own classified missions -- in July 2021.

Eight women have participated in the SEAL Officer Assessment and Selection process in the past seven years. Two completed assessment and selection, although they did not receive SEAL contracts, according to the Navy.

"Although neither were selected for a contract, female service members and civilians have a rich history of service within NSW, and their diverse talents and capabilities will continue to evolve and professionalize the NSW force," the spokesman said in an email to Military.com.

To become a Navy SEAL or Special Warfare Combatant Craft Crewman, candidates must meet certain physical, intellectual and medical requirements before they are offered a contract.

Once they receive a contract, they enter the "pipeline," which begins with the candidates attending a seven-week Naval Special Warfare Orientation in Coronado, California.

If they make it through that orientation course, candidates begin their specialized training, while enlisted SEAL candidates move on to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training.

Officers who want to become Navy SEALs must endure the physically demanding two-week SEAL Officer Assessment and Selection course before a board decides whether they should be given a contract, after which they would enter BUD/S.

Birch told the DACOWITS panel that the Navy is increasing outreach to potential pools of candidates and has placed female instructors at the Navy Special Warfare Training Center in order to generate interest among potential female Navy Special Warfare candidates.

The female instructors -- the Navy plans to increase their numbers from four to 11 -- help "normalize" for students the idea of women working alongside men, Birch said, and provide "downrange credibility" for female recruits who may be interested in Special Warfare.

As for outreach, the service is working with women within the Navy and other branches to attract candidates, he said.

"Obviously, we can't have [female] SEALs go out to the industry, because we don't have any yet, so it has to start somewhere," Birch said.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

military.com · by Patricia Kime · September 14, 2022

19. David Patrikarakos: could Putin now lash out after troops surrender?

David Patrikarakos: could Putin now lash out after troops surrender?

Mass surrender of Russian troops in Ukraine could be a genuine tipping point - so could a cornered Vladimir Putin now lash out, asks DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

By DAVID PATRIKARAKOS FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 13 September 2022 | UPDATED: 19:51 EDT, 13 September 2022

Daily Mail · by David Patrikarakos For The Daily Mail · September 13, 2022

Two months ago, my work as a conflict journalist took me to Kharkiv in north-eastern Ukraine. Over a million people once called it home – but today it is known as 'the city of broken windows'.

Now largely deserted, many of its buildings had been pulverised by the relentless Russian bombardment.

In the teeth of Vladimir Putin's inhumanity, the Ukrainians I spoke to remained optimistic that they would prevail. And yes, their courage was humbling: but even so, few of them perhaps foresaw how swiftly events would unfold around Kharkiv.

Over the past few days, a bold and bravura Ukrainian counter-attack has seen the mass surrender of Russian troops throughout the Kharkiv region.

In a Ukrainian lightning-strike, its forces have liberated village after village, reclaiming what President Zelensky says is an astonishing 2,317 sq miles of territory – an area roughly the size of Lincolnshire.

A Ukrainian soldier stands on a tank in the middle after the road in the Kharkiv region after troops took back a wide swathe of territory from Russia on Monday

Governor Oleg Sinegubov speaks to journalists after Russian Forces withdraw from the Balakliya, Kharkiv

Unfolding just 12 miles from the Russian border, it represents a stunning blow both to Moscow's prestige and its military planning. So what should we make of Russian troops simply fleeing, leaving behind their Soviet-era military hardware, the evidence that they have been using Iranian-supplied drones, and their charred and abandoned tanks?

And what should we make of reports that so many Russian soldiers have recently been captured – including a large number of officers – that Ukraine is running out of space to hold them? Well, some of this may be propaganda. But there is no question that these latest developments in and around Kharkiv are a disaster for Putin. Even his Kremlin lickspittles have been struggling to spin the news into anything positive.

Yesterday, Russia's military leaders admitted their troops had left three key cities – Balakliya, Izyum and Kupiansk, all in the Kharkiv province.

It was an acknowledgment that would have been unthinkable three months ago, just like the remarkable proclamation by a politician on Russian state-sponsored TV on Monday evening.

Ukraine would never be defeated, declared Boris Nadezhdin, and Putin had been misled by his officials. As such, he continued, peace talks were the only way forward.

As with anything spouted from Russia's slavishly Putinite media, we cannot take Nadezhdin's comments at face value. It is possible they were a Kremlin-approved ploy to test the waters of public opinion.

Nonetheless, that peace talks are being openly mooted at all in Russia is highly significant. Even the Kremlin's army of online trolls – typing regime propaganda in chat rooms and forums across the internet – have begun to whisper of withdrawal.

All of this suggests a genuine tipping point in this torrid conflict. Ensconced in his bunker, Putin must be feeling the pressure. The dictator knows that what limited gains his army has made over the past six months have come at a terrible cost. He could barely have imagined the scale of the losses his troops have suffered.

David Patrikarakos: 'The big question, however, is what Putin will do next. None of his options is ideal. His preferred tactic – simply ignoring information that he does not like – will no longer do'

Of the original 200,000-strong force mustered by the Kremlin for the invasion in February, the Pentagon has estimated that up to 80,000 have been killed or wounded.

That's tens of thousands of soldiers sent home in body bags or on stretchers, rather than parading in victory through Kyiv. Now to this grim toll the Russian propaganda machine is having to add desertion and retreat.

The big question, however, is what Putin will do next. None of his options is ideal. His preferred tactic – simply ignoring information that he does not like – will no longer do.

Putin's second option is to continue to lie, claiming that his withdrawal from the Kharkiv region is a 'regrouping' aimed at focusing troops in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine's east. That might suffice as an excuse – but not for long.

David Patrikarakos: 'Of course, Putin retains one final chilling threat: the use of nuclear weapons, whose deployment he has threatened from the start of the conflict'

Third, he will do what the Russian military always does when it finds itself in a tight corner – take it out on the civilian population. This was the tactic Putin deployed so devastatingly in Syria, when Russian forces pulverised the city of Aleppo into near oblivion.

The 'Aleppo-isation' of Ukrainian cities in the south and east is already well under way. Russian missiles have pounded the infrastructure in Kharkiv so relentlessly that large parts of the remaining civilian population are now without water and electricity.

Putin does not blanch at such brazen war crimes, and there is already a mountain of evidence of mass graves and torture in areas of Ukraine freed from the Russians. I have no doubt that more atrocities will surface in Kharkiv.

President Zelensky has said that given a choice of living under Putin's boot or not having water and electricity, his people would choose the latter.

Of course, Putin retains one final chilling threat: the use of nuclear weapons, whose deployment he has threatened from the start of the conflict.

The White House takes this possibility seriously, noting that every Russian military exercise of an invasion of the Baltic states has involved a nuclear scenario.

But I think it is the least likely course of action. Putin may be a despot, but he is a pragmatic one. He knows that unleashing the first nuclear missiles on the world since 1945 would cross a terrible line. Should he do so, even Germany, so reliant on Russian gas, would refuse to accept it. That would plunge the Russian economy into bankruptcy: a collapse as total as that suffered by the Soviet Union in 1990, a moment that Putin regards as the biggest catastrophe in Russian history.

David Patrikarakos: The liberation of much of Kharkiv is, too, a timely rejoinder to the siren voices of the Corbynista Left, who warned that the West's decision to arm Ukrainian fighters would only prolong the war and lead to more civilian deaths

And even a small 'tactical battlefield' nuke would be likely to cause fallout in neighbouring countries, possibly including Poland or the Baltic states, all Nato members.

The alliance would, in that instance, have no choice but to respond militarily, effectively marking the start of World War Three.

Putin doesn't want Armageddon – and nor do his generals. They, we must hope, would step in if he ever tried to lash out with nuclear weapons.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves. There have been many false dawns marking the end of this filthy war, and still the fighting rages.

Nonetheless, the past few days have offered us the most heartening news to emerge from the conflict in months.

The liberation of much of Kharkiv is, too, a timely rejoinder to the siren voices of the Corbynista Left, who warned that the West's decision to arm Ukrainian fighters would only prolong the war and lead to more civilian deaths.

These appeasers have been among us since the first days of the war, urging Ukraine – and us – to surrender.

Thank God we ignored them. Today they look like the fools they are.

• David Patrikarakos is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd and the author of War In 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict In The Twenty-First Century

Daily Mail · by David Patrikarakos For The Daily Mail · September 13, 2022

20. Senate advances $6.5 billion Taiwan military aid bill

Senate advances $6.5 billion Taiwan military aid bill

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · September 14, 2022

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday advanced a sprawling bill that would give Taiwan the same benefits as major non-NATO allies, provide $6.5 billion in military aid, expedite arms sales and prioritize the transfer of excess U.S. defense articles there.

The Foreign Relations Committee advanced the Taiwan Policy Act 17-5 after amending certain provisions to address the White House’s concerns with some components of the legislation.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., told Defense News this week that the changes occurred following “some very constructive conversations” with national security adviser Jake Sullivan. “We’ve heard their views, and we think we’re landing in a good spot that still produces a very strong bill and then meets and assuages some of their concerns,” Menendez said.

The bipartisan bill would provide $6.5 billion in military aid to Taiwan through 2027 via Foreign Military Financing — a program that provides foreign countries the ability to purchase U.S. military equipment with grants and loans. The initial bill would have provided $4.5 billion through 2026, but the committee amended the legislation with a $2 billion increase.

At the same time, the initial bill would have designated Taiwan as a major non-NATO ally, a designation that falls short of a mutual defense pact but helps expedite arms transfers. The amended version that the Foreign Relations Committee advanced instead states that “Taiwan shall be treated as though it were designated a major non-NATO ally.”

While the new language allows Taiwan to receive all the same benefits as non-NATO allies under U.S. law, it stops short of a formal designation that could raise questions about Washington’s recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty — a matter that could potentially upend Sino-U.S. relations.

Still, the designation will help accelerate Taiwan’s purchases of U.S. military equipment. Taiwan currently faces a $14 billion backlog in delivery of weapons it purchased from the United States via the Foreign Military Sales process, according to a document obtained by Defense News in April.

The Taiwan Policy Act directs the Defense and State departments to “prioritize and expedite” foreign military sales for Taipei and prohibits both departments from delaying the sales through a bundling route, whereby a defense manufacturer would simultaneously produce weapons systems from multiple contracts.

The amended version of the legislation also builds upon that language with several other provisions to address the backlog. Chiefly, the new language also requires U.S. defense manufacturers to “expedite and prioritize” the production of weapons that Taiwan purchased above other items in their queues. Another new provision would require the Defense and State departments to develop a list of weapons systems that are “pre-cleared and prioritized for sale and release to Taiwan through the foreign military sales program.”

The State Department approved earlier this month an additional $1.1 billion in arms sales to Taiwan, including logistics support for Taipei’s Surveillance Radar Program, 60 Harpoon anti-ship missiles and 100 Sidewinder tactical missiles.

The initial version of the Taiwan Policy Act would also have allowed the president to establish a “war reserve stockpile” that would authorize the placement of pre-positioned U.S. munitions and other assets in Taiwan for use against a Chinese attack. The amended bill instead alters this to a “regional contingency stockpile” at an unspecified location, but still allocates $500 million per year in funding for those stocks through 2025.

Lastly, the bill directs the president to establish a five-year plan to prioritize the delivery of excess defense articles to Taiwan while requiring the Defense and State departments to develop a comprehensive training program with the Taiwanese military.

“This program will accelerate Taiwan’s military reform and expand training for the Taiwanese military using realistic scenarios,” Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.; Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Ed Markey, D-Mass.; Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii; and Rand Paul, R-Ky., were the five committee members who voted against the legislation.

In addition to numerous other nondefense provisions, the bill also includes sanctions on China if it “is knowingly engaged in a significant escalation in aggression” against Taiwan. China considers the island a rogue province and has threatened to return it under the mainland’s control, by force if necessary.

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

21. Xi and Putin want to create a new world order. Russia's setback in Ukraine could spoil their plans

Again, this is my thesis about China: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

Xi and Putin want to create a new world order. Russia's setback in Ukraine could spoil their plans

CNN · by Analysis by Nectar Gan, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN)The last time Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down face to face, they declared triumphantly the arrival of a "new era" in international relations.

Amid a Western diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics and a looming crisis in Ukraine, the world's two most powerful autocrats shared their vision for a new world order: it would better accommodate their nations' interests, and no longer be dominated by the West.

In a 5,000-word joint statement, the two leaders declared a friendship with "no limits" and spelled out their shared grievances toward the United States and its allies.

"The world is going through momentous changes," their joint statement said, noting the "transformation of the global governance architecture and world order."

More than 200 days later, Xi and Putin are to meet again at a regional summit in the city of Samarkand in southeastern Uzbekistan. Much has changed, but not necessarily in ways China or Russia could have predicted.

Read More

Three weeks after meeting Xi in Beijing -- and just days after the Winter Olympics ended, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He had expected a quick victory, but seven months in, Russia is far from winning. Its forces are exhausted, demoralized, and fleeing territories they have occupied for months.

A destroyed Russian tank overgrown by plants in the village of Lukashivka, in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine.

And that is making China nervous. Having grown ever closer to Moscow under Xi, Beijing has a direct stake in the war's outcome. A defeated Russia will strengthen the West and become a less useful and reliable asset in China's great power rivalry with the US. A weakened Moscow might also be less of a distraction for the US, thereby enabling Washington to focus more squarely on Beijing.

Xi has a fine line to tread. If he leans too much into helping Russia, he risks exposing China to Western sanctions and diplomatic blowback that would harm its own interests. The backlash would also come at a sensitive time for Xi, who is only weeks away from seeking a norm-breaking third term at the 20th Party Congress.

So far, the two authoritarian powers have not come any closer to shaping the world order in their favor -- if anything, experts say Russia's war on Ukraine has served to strengthen Western resolve.

High stakes

For Putin, invading Ukraine was likely a first step in removing Russia from the post-World War II -- and post-Cold War -- international order.

A swift seizure of Ukraine would have dealt a painful blow to NATO, expanded Moscow's sphere of influence and significantly shifted the balance of power in Europe, in Russia's favor.

A Russian victory might also have set a dangerous precedent in regards to China, which has vowed to "unify" with the self-governing democracy of Taiwan -- by force if necessary.

Under Xi, Beijing is already stepping up military activity around the island. An easy win for Putin would have further deepened Xi's belief the West is in decline, and provided a template for an attack on Taiwan -- a hugely consequential event that could reset the global balance of power.

Tanks fire projectiles during a Taiwanese military live-fire drill, after Beijing increased its military exercises near Taiwan in September.

But Ukraine fought back and instead of sabotaging the US-led order, the invasion has reinvigorated NATO, strengthened transatlantic ties and united the West.

Putin's meeting with Xi, meanwhile, could not have come at a worse time. Russian forces are retreating en mass in the northeast of Ukraine, losing more territory in a week than they captured in five months.

While it is still too early to predict the outcome, even the prospect of Russia losing the war is enough to make Beijing anxious.

Russia's setback in Ukraine is already starting to draw considerable political backlash within Moscow, and a complete defeat could potentially create political instability in the Kremlin -- and serious headaches for China.

While the growing ties between China and Russia are primarily driven by their tensions with the West, they are also partly propelled by the close personal relationship between Xi and Putin. During his decade in power, Xi has met Putin 38 times -- more than twice as many times as he has met any other world leader.

There is no guarantee a Russia without a strong Putin would be as keen to pursue a "no-limits" friendship with Beijing; in a worst-case scenario, it might even grow more friendly to the West, adding to long-running Chinese fears about geopolitical encirclement by the US.

Map shows how Ukraine pulled off counteroffensive 04:19

Self-interest calculation

The question, then, becomes how far Beijing is willing to go to ensure Putin remains in control, and that Russia remains a powerful security and strategic partner to counterbalance America.

For its part, China has abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations. It has blamed NATO and the US for the war and decried Western sanctions on Moscow. It has also stepped up economic assistance to its neighbor, boosting bilateral trade to record levels.

"China is willing to give Russia some tacit support politically, diplomatically and to some extent economically, but the bottom line is that it isn't going to go out of its way and undercut its other strategic objectives to support Russia," said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Putin needs Xi Jinping's help more than ever after his setbacks in Ukraine

So far, Beijing has carefully avoided actions that could violate Western sanctions, such as providing direct military aid to Moscow. Access to the global market is crucial for China, especially when its economy is already beset by severe problems -- from slowing growth, skyrocketing youth unemployment to a collapsing housing market.

One area to watch, Hart said, is arms sales. China has long been one of Russia's largest purchasers of arms. "I wonder if Russia's own defense industry is overstretched, would it turn to buy weapons from China," he said.

But even then, China would likely seek to send spare parts or items not on the sanction list, or ship them via convoluted routes that are difficult to trace.

"(Beijing and Moscow) have said over and over again that they don't intend to create a formal alliance that binds them in ways that go against their interests. That didn't work for them during the Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1950s, and I think they really view that as a lesson of history," Hart said.

"I think China will only continue to strengthen relations with Russia, to the extent that it really is in their overall interests."

Growing unease

But even before Russia's battlefield woes, its military aggression toward Ukraine -- and Beijing's tacit support for Moscow -- had already alienated some countries outside the Western orbit.

When Xi and Putin meet other leaders of the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Uzbekistan on Thursday and Friday, the war in Ukraine will be the elephant in the room.

Having watched Russian tanks roll into Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, Central Asian leaders of former Soviet territories are worried that Russia could encroach on their land too.

Kazakhstan, in particular, has refused to toe Moscow's line. It has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and its President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has publicly refused to recognize Russia-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, enraging some Kremlin officials.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping with Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as he arrives in Kazakhstan on Wednesday.

China's refusal to condemn Russia has caused unease among Central Asian countries, said Niva Yau, a senior researcher at the OSCE Academy, a foreign policy think tank in Kyrgyzstan.

"China is at odds with countries in the region because it is still looking at Russia's war in Ukraine from this anti-West narrative -- like it's about to bring down Western hegemony," she said.

That risks hampering China's efforts to build stronger ties with its Central Asian neighbors, an endeavor China has invested heavily in for two decades, according to Yau.

During Xi's state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday -- his first foreign trip in nearly 1,000 days -- the Chinese leader sought to allay such concerns.

"China will always support Kazakhstan in maintaining national independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity," Xi told Tokayev, the Kazakh President, according to Chinese state media.

An anti-West world order?

Xi's trip to Central Asia isn't only about showing support for Putin, though. It is also about strengthening ties in China's periphery and reasserting Beijing's global influence.

Founded by China in 2001 to combat terrorism and promote border security, the SCO was shrouded in relative obscurity for years. Under Xi, it expanded in size and profile, granting membership to India and Pakistan in 2017. After years on the waiting list as an observer, Iran is slated to become a full member at this summit, according to Chinese state media reports.

Afghanistan is also an observer, and the Taliban -- having taken over Kabul following a chaotic US withdrawal last year -- is sending a delegation to Samarkand.

But it is Iran that has set off most alarm bells in the West. Since 2019, Iran, Russia and China have held three joint naval drills amid deepening ties. Now, Iran's expected inclusion in the SCO is stoking fears long held by some observers that the grouping is emerging as an anti-West bloc.

But some experts say in its current state, the SCO is not really the ideal platform for China and Russia to push that anti-West world order.

China is alarmed by the Quad. But its threats are driving the group closer together

As a multilateral organization, the SCO is a much weaker regional bloc compared to the European Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

"There has actually been some tension at times within the SCO. Russia has tried to advance some of its interests which aren't always aligned with China's in the region. I don't think it's perfectly set up to be this kind of platform for shaping a new world order," said Hart at the CSIS.

Also complicating the picture is the presence of India, which has strong ties with Russia dating back to the Cold War. But Delhi has also seen relations with Beijing nosedive due to conflicts along their border, and has moved closer to Washington and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

India is a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue alongside the US, Japan and Australia, a grouping driven closer together by China's threats.

Nevertheless, Xi will use the SCO summit to show both the home crowd and the world that, despite being diplomatically isolated by the West, China still has friends and partners, and is ready to take on more leadership on the world stage.

But if the war in Ukraine ends up being a major inflection point for Russia's weakening, it could deal a setback for Xi's plans.

"China doesn't really have any other large powerful partners in the way that the United States has many European and Indo-Pacific allies that it can rely on. So Russia is by far the most powerful state that is somewhat closely aligned with China," Hart said.

"I think that is something Beijing worries about -- that Russia will overextend itself and it could undermine their collective efforts to shape the world order."

CNN · by Analysis by Nectar Gan, CNN

22. The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War

​Look forward to comments from our international law experts.

The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War | Alex de Waal

The New York Review of Books · by Alex de Waal

The United Nations has assessed that 276 million people worldwide today are “severely food insecure.” Forty million are in “emergency” conditions, one step short of the UN’s technical definition of “famine.” By early this year the combined effects of the climate crisis, the economic fallout from Covid-19, armed conflict, and the rising costs of fuel and food had already caused a sharp increase in the number of people in need of relief. Then the Russian invasion of Ukraine suddenly shut down wheat exports from the world’s breadbasket. For five months, Russian warships blockaded Black Sea ports and stopped grain cargoes from leaving, both to strangle the Ukrainian economy and to destabilize food-importing nations to pressure the US and Europe into relaxing sanctions.

“We face a real risk of multiple famines this year, and next year could be even worse,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned the General Assembly in July. Four days later he and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that they had brokered parallel deals with Russia and Ukraine to resume grain and synthetic fertilizer shipments. Despite a Russian strike on Odesa, the first ships laden with Ukrainian wheat departed on August 1. (No date is yet set for Russia to resume exporting fertilizer.) As of September 4, eighty-six ships carrying over two million tons of food had left Ukrainian ports. World prices for wheat and sunflower oil have dropped, portending lower bread prices in Egypt and easing the strain on the World Food Program (WFP) budget for emergency food aid. Speaking in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Guterres congratulated himself and Erdoğan on the agreement, the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which would, he said, “help vulnerable people in every corner of the world.”

Lifting the Black Sea blockade is indeed an important step toward making food more affordable for tens of millions of people who before the recent price hike were already spending a third or more of their daily outlay on bread. Poor families in countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Lebanon, and Nigeria will become less “food insecure,” in the specialists’ parlance. For that alone, Guterres is entitled to a rare plaudit for diplomacy. But by implying that the Black Sea Grain Initiative would not only reduce bread prices and put more grain on the market but also prevent famine, the UN Secretary-General—along with many commentators—was conflating food insecurity with mass starvation, a very different kind of crisis.

Bringing Ukrainian produce back to the world market will alleviate the first but have little impact on the second. This is because almost all modern famines are caused by tactics of war. The hunger siege has long been the warmaker’s favorite weapon: it is simple, cheap, silent, and horribly effective. Even as it stopped ships laden with wheat from leaving Ukraine, Russia forced Ukrainians into cellars and kept them from getting food, water, and other essentials. The Russian army has had practice with the strategy; deprivation of everything necessary to sustain life was a major feature of the Chechen Wars. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad’s troops spray-painted the slogan SURRENDER OR STARVE at checkpoints outside opposition enclaves, which they went on to besiege with Russian military advice and support.

According to the UN, more than half a million people in four countries—Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen, and Madagascar—are in “catastrophic or famine conditions.” Last week the UN and humanitarian agencies also declared “unfolding famine” in Somalia, a nation hit by a lethal combination of drought and conflict, where they have collected survey data showing that certain parts of the country are crossing the threshold from “emergency” to “famine.” Of those five countries, four are stricken by civil war. (A rare contemporary case of extreme food insecurity without civil war is Madagascar, where a sequence of unprecedented droughts has left the southern part of the island in dire straits.) Fighting in poor countries heightens food insecurity by hindering farming, disrupting food markets, and diverting scarce budgets from health and welfare programs to soldiers and arms.

Somalia aside, the other cases of extreme hunger—in Ethiopia, Yemen, and South Sudan—are found where one warring party has chosen to starve out its enemy. In contrast to Somalia, where the newly elected government is open about the nation’s plight, the authorities in those countries are determined to cover up the extent of starvation and prevent aid from reaching those they have made hungry. The fates of vulnerable people under these conditions are decided not by market prices or aid budgets but by the calculus of men who pursue starvation as policy. The victims are well aware that starvation is a political outcome rather than an impersonal misfortune—“the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat,” as the economist Amartya Sen wrote in his book Poverty and Famines, “not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.”

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In his Lviv speech on the lifting of the Black Sea blockade, Guterres avoided speaking about these starvation crimes. It was an ironic place for him to evade that topic. The twentieth century’s two most significant international lawyers lived in Lviv at different times before World War II: Hersch Lauterpacht, a principal legal advisor to the prosecution at Nuremberg who pioneered the philosophy and jurisprudence of prohibiting “crimes against humanity,” and Raphael Lemkin, who later coined the word “genocide” and campaigned for it to be recognized as an international crime. In his astonishing book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, written during the war, Lemkin devoted far more space to the Nazis’ use of food deprivation than he did to gas chambers and death squads. The ration delivered to the Warsaw Ghetto was 184 calories per person per day, less than one tenth of what was needed for subsistence. Yet when the Allied lawyers drafted the Genocide Convention, starvation was left unnamed, subsumed under “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”—one of several elements in Lemkin’s earlier definitions of genocide that disappeared during the process of finalizing the convention.

In a recent article, the legal scholars Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk argue that starvation failed to “become the paradigmatic war crime in international law” in significant part because “the Western states that shaped international public and humanitarian law to mitigate war during the twentieth century” were also among those that “used starvation as an instrument of war.”

 Britain and the US in particular, they show, “often successfully blocked restrictions on blockade” that would subject air and naval warfare to the new humanitarian restrictions for war on land. For over 150 years, the world’s paramount maritime powers—first Britain and then the US—have been more accustomed to enforcing blockades than trying to lift them, more interested in preserving the belligerents’ privilege to wage wars of hunger than in protecting the rights of the civilians those wars starve.*

“War,” the German-trained American jurist Francis Lieber wrote, “is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy.” That wording appears in a document known as the Lieber Code, which President Abraham Lincoln commissioned during the Civil War to codify the rules of conduct for the Union army. It is the point of departure for every subsequent effort to restrict starvation in war.

British policy on starvation, meanwhile, was shaped by the logic of maritime empire, according to which control over trade was both the means of warfare and its objective. Despite the paintings and monuments celebrating its battles against France and Spain, the Royal Navy’s main task was the quotidian one of policing blockades. During its war against Napoleon, London treated food as contraband, and its warships intercepted merchant vessels under any flag sailing in or out of ports on the European continent. Versions of this strategy lay at the center of Britain’s war doctrine for more than a century thereafter, starvation lurking unmentioned.

Chris McGrath/Getty

A cargo of Ukrainian grain anchored in the Marmara Sea for an inspection, August 2022

The first international codification of the laws of naval war was at a Paris conference in 1856, immediately after the Crimean War. On this occasion, British diplomats balanced their reliance on economic warfare with their interest in the rights of their own merchant ships in the event of a war not involving Britain. One crucial provision in the Paris Declaration, strongly backed by the US, strengthened protections on neutral shipping. Another required blockades to be effective in order to be legal, which restricted the weapon to those with the biggest navies. Half a century later, at a conference in London, these formulations were refined, but the British Parliament refused to ratify the declaration on the grounds that it would unduly restrict Britannia’s rule over the waves. Indeed, during and after World War I, up to 750,000 German civilians died of hunger and related causes after Britain declared that it would treat food destined for Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire as contraband.

All sides used starvation during the next world war. According to the exhaustive survey of the topic by the historian Lizzie Collingham, as many people died of hunger as in combat, massacres, and air raids combined.

 The German Hungerplan aimed to exterminate tens of millions of people in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia through starvation; it fell short of that number, but approximately 6 million died in those lands of that cause. Britain resurrected its ring of steel around occupied Europe and only belatedly accepted Red Cross shipments to alleviate starvation in Greece. The US called its own naval encirclement of Japan and its mining of Japanese harbors Operation Starvation.Advertisement

“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally,” Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland, wrote in his diary. His words were, sadly, heeded: starvation was the war’s footnoted crime. Within his domain was Lemberg, today’s Lviv, with a prewar population of almost 100,000 Jews, the site of pogroms, a ghetto, deportations, and mass killings—but scholars of the Holocaust would need to pore over marginalia to ascertain how many perished of starvation there. As I have shown elsewhere, the postwar trials of Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s minister of food and agriculture, and Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, commander of the German army that besieged Leningrad, only cemented starvation’s marginality to international criminal law. The American judges who acquitted Leeb of charges associated with starvation noted that the Lieber Code in fact permitted them. “We might wish the law were otherwise,” they said, “but we must administer it as we find it.”

After the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross proposed a thorough overhaul of the Geneva Conventions that introduced a raft of protections for civilians. In addition to prohibiting hostage-taking and reprisals against civilians, the ICRC also wanted to outlaw starvation blockades. London and Washington objected and prevailed: the law continued to permit blockades, giving the blockading power discretion over what should be allowed in, and even making Red Cross humanitarian aid conditional on the blockader’s assessment of military necessity. The new laws of war that were adopted in 1949 were radical in many spheres, but conservative when it came to starvation.

Only in 1977, after terrible war-induced famines in Nigeria and Bangladesh, was the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare expressly prohibited in the Geneva Conventions. Article 54(2) of the first Additional Protocol, adopted that year, specified:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

The provision was aimed at ground wars. Still missing was any prohibition on obstructing supplies through naval blockade.

*

The beauty of blockade and sanctions, from the enforcers’ perspective, is that they are tools of bureaucratic regulation rather than displays of raw violence. The most favorable interpretation is that a well-run blockade is a measure short of war; whatever suffering it entails is at least preferable to fighting. The more cynical view is that the Atlantic powers still reserve the right to wage unrestricted economic warfare using not only ships and aircraft but also their dominant position in the world’s financial system. The US exercised that right again in the 1990s when it imposed ferocious sanctions on Iraq, contributing to a humanitarian crisis there. Asked on 60 Minutes about a report of the deaths of “over half a million children,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a response she would come to regret: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” Later evidence suggested that the death toll was considerably lower, but Albright’s response makes one wonder what number the US might have considered “worth it.”

In 2015 the US became party to another blockade. The previous year in Yemen a post–Arab Spring national democracy conference had broken down, a civil war erupted, and a political-religious group known as the Houthis marched on the capital, Sanaa. In response, Saudi Arabia put together an Arab coalition backed by the US, Britain, and France that launched what they mistakenly assumed would be a six-week blitzkrieg against the Houthis. Seven years later, that blitz is still underway. As well as a sustained air campaign and ground offensives by fractious Yemeni militias and foreign mercenaries, the Saudi-led coalition has imposed a tight air and sea blockade on the Houthi-controlled areas, shut down banking services, and imposed sanctions on remittances from abroad. The Houthi authorities worsened the crisis both through their corruption and intransigence and by taxing farmers, merchants, and aid organizations. American equipment sustains the Saudi air force, and US navy ships help to enforce the blockade in the Red Sea.

Mohammed Hamoud/Anadolu Agency/Getty

A WFP worker distributing food, Sanaa, Yemen, June 2020

Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, was already dependent on food imports and facing a dire water shortage when the blockade went into effect. This year, World Food Program supplies are reaching 13 million people, more than a third of the population and a fraction of the need. The UN has bitten its tongue, unwilling to criticize the countries that fund its humanitarian programs. In December 2020 it estimated that 131,000 Yemenis had died of “indirect causes”—a euphemism for starvation and lack of medicine—since the war began. That figure hasn’t been updated. None of the warring parties have permitted international agencies to conduct the kind of surveys that would allow for a full enumeration of the toll of the crisis. They have good reason to be afraid of what the numbers might be.

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In May 2018 the Netherlands led a group of nine countries to bring a draft resolution on armed conflict and hunger to the UN Security Council. The preamble to Resolution 2417 underlined “that using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare may constitute a war crime,” and the operative paragraphs called on the Secretary-General to notify the Council swiftly if armed conflict threatened to bring about widespread hunger. The resolution passed. For the first time, the world’s highest authority had explicitly deemed weaponized starvation unacceptable.

Skeptical members—including Russia, China, India, and Ethiopia—were reassured that Resolution 2417 codified existing law rather than introducing anything new. Nonetheless they have worked diligently to keep it a dead letter. Russia and China, as two of the Council’s five permanent members, hold the ultimate threat of a veto. In July, for instance, Russia vetoed a plan for a cross-border aid pipeline from Turkey into opposition-controlled areas of Syria, both to stand by its crucial Middle Eastern ally and because it strongly resists international humanitarian activities that override what it considers to be sovereign prerogatives.

Ethiopia, host of the African Union, is no less culpable. When the AU got around to discussing armed conflict and hunger this May—after four years of prevarication—its communiqué was overwhelmingly concerned with nutrition, agriculture, and trade and made not a single reference to starvation as a war crime, and only a single, incoherent sentence on hunger as a weapon: “Strongly condemns any kind of conditionality for food access and the use of starvation as instruments of war and/or access to humanitarian assistance.” Meanwhile, in its ongoing war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls Ethiopia’s northernmost region, the Ethiopian government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has used hunger as a weapon to try to crush the bodies and spirits of Tigrayans.

In November 2020 the Federal Government in Addis Ababa launched “law enforcement operations” against the TPLF in response to what it called an unprovoked attack on its army units in Tigray. The “operation” became a war of destruction and pillage that demolished the development gains the region had made over three decades. Farmers were forced out of their homes, hospitals and clinics were ransacked, and soldiers from the federal coalition perpetrated mass killings and rapes of civilians. It all appeared to be part of a plan to reduce Tigray to penury. Tigrayan soldiers also committed violations and their attacks caused displacement, but there’s no indication that this was part of a plan to use starvation as a weapon.

In June 2021 the Tigrayans recaptured most of their region, but since then the federal government has encircled and besieged it, shutting off all banking services, telecommunications, and trade. For nine months the World Food Program was allowed to deliver less than 10 percent of the estimated minimum ration until a humanitarian truce in March eased its access modestly. Warnings of widespread hunger were sounded as soon as the fighting started, yet Guterres did not put the crisis on the Security Council’s agenda, and attempts to do so by Ireland—a non-permanent member—were said to be thwarted by the three African members along with China and Russia.

There is only one officially sanctioned way into Tigray: by air from Addis Ababa. The government restricts travel permits, allowing just a few humanitarian workers to fly there. On returning, their phones and laptops are reportedly examined for pictures or data. If they speak to the press, they risk expulsion from the country. The last foreign journalist allowed into Tigray was the New York Times reporter Declan Walsh, who was there in June 2021. Recently a French team that secretly slipped into the region released the first footage from Tigray since then. They filmed starving people gathering at a church. “They are drinking the holy water to fill their stomachs,” the team’s guide explained, breaking down in tears.

Governments that deploy starvation go to great lengths to stop the United Nations from using the word “famine.” If the required data aren’t there, the UN won’t use the word. Aid workers point out that vast numbers of children can die in a situation classed as a “food emergency,” one step short of famine. In South Sudan, a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated that 190,000 people died from hunger, lack of medicine, and related causes between 2014 and 2018, although just several small parts of the country—in which between three and four thousand perished—were classified as suffering from famine in 2016. The food crisis hasn’t improved since, but the South Sudanese government has tightened control over the food security reporting system to ensure that the UN won’t embarrass it with another famine declaration.

Last June Mark Lowcock, then the UN’s head of emergency relief, was ready to say outright that there was famine in Tigray. But the UN system as a whole skirted around the issue with euphemistic language such as “at risk of famine” and “famine-like conditions” because no one had collected the data to prove that Tigrayans were dying of hunger. Nine months after Lowcock’s attempt to stir the UN to outrage and action—he left his post in July 2021—a Belgian-led research team estimated that up to 265,000 people had already perished in Tigray’s famine. That number will now be higher. The World Food Program recently released the findings from a survey that determined that almost a third of Tigrayan children were malnourished, but the Abiy government seems not to have allowed the staff to collect data on child deaths. Without mortality numbers, a WPF spokesperson told the press, there couldn’t be a famine declaration. “We just don’t know,” she said.

*

In his 1952 essay “The Problem of the Revision of the Law of War,” Lauterpacht asked what sort of law could preserve humanity when warring powers seek to make their enemies’ societies incapable of sustaining a war effort, including by destroying their food supplies and cities. Describing the laws of war as “at the vanishing point of international law,” he praised the effort that went into expanding the Geneva Conventions but noted that the revisions fell hopelessly short. “The law on these subjects,” he wrote, “must be shaped—so far as it can be shaped at all—by reference not to existing law but to more compelling considerations of humanity, of the survival of civilization, and of the sanctity of the individual human being.”

Alongside nuclear weapons, mass starvation is the vanishing point of the laws of war. We can only bring it into focus if we disallow the weapons of economic warfare—siege, blockade, and sanctions—by incorporating them in the established formulation of protecting “objects indispensable to survival.”

It is hard to see clearly the current US government’s position on hunger blockades. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley—a Trump appointee—voted in favor of Resolution 2417 and went on to invoke it selectively, vigorously condemning the Assad regime but not the blockade of Yemen. President Biden’s representative at the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has been more even-handed, calling out starvation crimes in Yemen and Ethiopia as well as Syria and Ukraine. Samantha Power, administrator of the US Agency for International Development and the author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (2002), has condemned weaponized starvation. But when she gave a speech entitled “The Line Between Crisis and Catastrophe” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in July, stopping starvation crimes didn’t make her list of three priorities for fighting the global food crisis—immediate humanitarian aid, investment in agriculture, and diplomatic efforts to increase aid budgets and reduce export restrictions.

Addressing the Security Council in May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken teetered on the brink of reversing the US military’s long record of permitting certain acts of starvation. “The Russian Federation is not the only government or organization to exploit food insecurity for its own cynical ends,” he said, urging the Council to “consistently call out governments and armed groups” for “attacking the means of food production and distribution, blocking humanitarian aid from reaching those in need,” and “besieging civilian populations.” But both in that speech and since, he has been notably diffident about calling out starvation crimes except in cases where the US has already made its position clear, as in Syria, or where the culprits are both powerless and discredited, as in South Sudan.

The test case is Tigray. Following the humanitarian truce in March, WFP convoys began rolling up the steep roads to the region—still a woefully inadequate plan for feeding the nearly five million people estimated to need help, but a substantial improvement. Banking, telecommunications, fuel, and medicine remained blocked, and in June the region’s main hospital was forced to close for lack of supplies. After twenty months without salaries, nurses couldn’t feed their own children and were fainting from hunger on their shifts.

Eduardo Soteras/AFP/Getty

A convoy of WFP trucks en route to Tigray, June 2022

The TPLF and the Abiy government talked peace to their publics and, it appears, to one another. In an open letter to world leaders on August 23, the TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael claimed that at an unspecified date the two sides had reached an agreement to lift the blockade, but that the federal government had then backtracked. (The government has so far not commented on this allegation, but no international envoy has denied it.) Whatever the reason for the breakdown in talks, both sides readied for war. The Ethiopians mobilized new divisions to the borders with Tigray and dispatched forces to Eritrea to join up with the Eritrean army. The Tigrayans saw this buildup as the prelude to an attack from all sides. Debretsion concluded his letter with a warning: “Our choice is only whether we perish by starvation or whether we die fighting for our rights and our dignity.”

Fighting erupted the next day, with the Tigrayan troops gaining an early advantage. Each side blamed the other for firing the first shots. Blinken condemned both for breaking the “humanitarian truce,” which he said had “saved countless lives and enabled assistance to reach tens of thousands.” David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program, posted an enraged tweet accusing the TPLF of stealing fuel intended for his trucks; a TPLF spokesman responded that the army was reclaiming fuel it had loaned the UN some months before. The Ethiopian air force bombed the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle. For all these reasons, humanitarian operations stopped. One of the functions of a siege is that communities start to see their social fabrics unravel when they starve, and as the deprivation of Tigray deepened with no end in sight, discontent rumbled. Tigrayans asked why their secretive leadership had mobilized a huge army but had no evident plan to break the encirclement. In his open letter, Debretsion stated his preconditions for reopening peace talks, including the withdrawal of Eritrea and the restoration of Tigray’s pre-war boundaries. Numbers one and two were lifting the siege and granting unfettered humanitarian access. “The blockade is a war crime,” he wrote, and “the continued perpetration of a war crime is not a matter for negotiation under any circumstances.”

As my colleagues Bridget Conley, Catriona Murdoch, Wayne Jordash KC, and I have recently shown, lawyers, diplomats, and human rights advocates are fashioning legal tools to prohibit and punish starvation crimes. States could, for instance, adopt into their own laws a 2019 amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court that prohibits starvation in non-international armed conflicts, and starvation could be included in the mandates of UN investigative bodies. Ultimately, the hope is to be able to prosecute an individual for the war crime of starvation. But the tools of international criminal law are only as strong as the moral outrage of those who choose to wield them. On the subject of Tigray, Guterres has failed to take a lead, and the Security Council has thus far remained intractable. In the wake of the renewed fighting, a meeting scheduled for Monday, September 12 will serve as a test of the Council members’ position of the legality of the blockade.

The US is in an awkward spot. When the fighting restarted, Blinken demanded that the two sides resume talks “without preconditions.” His outrage appears diluted as he pushes for aid convoys as a response to starvation crimes. Like previous US officials, he has chosen to shift the discussion from law to mercy, refusing to take the essential leap from appealing for food availability to demanding food entitlement. The result, intended or not, is that the US is defaulting to its longstanding doctrine that blockade is a tool to be regulated and not a crime in itself. “Starvation deaths,” Sen observed in the last sentence of Poverty and Famines, “can reflect legality with a vengeance.”

The New York Review of Books · by Alex de Waal

​23. Putin and Xi due to discuss Ukraine and Taiwan

Putin and Xi due to discuss Ukraine and Taiwan

Reuters · by Mukhammadsharif Mamatkulov

• Summary
• Companies
• Xi on first trip since COVID pandemic
• Xi and Putin to discuss Ukraine and Taiwan
• Xi has yet to meet President Biden
• India's Modi to attend summit in Uzbekistan
• Iran to join Shanghai security bloc

SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin meet on Thursday in an ancient Uzbek Silk Road city to discuss the Ukraine war, tensions over Taiwan and the deepening partnership between the rising superpower of China and the natural resources titan of Russia.

On his first trip outside China since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi arrived in Central Asia on Wednesday, just a month before the Communist Party is set to cement his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. read more

Xi and Putin are due to meet in Samarkand on Thursday afternoon, according to a schedule distributed by the Russian delegation to media.

"The presidents will discuss both the bilateral agenda and the main regional and international topics," Putin's foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters in Moscow on Tuesday.

Ushakov said the leaders would discuss Ukraine and Taiwan at the meeting which he said would hold "special significance" given the geopolitical situation.

The last time Xi and Putin met in person, just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, they declared a "no limits" partnership and inked a promise to collaborate more against the West. read more

Putin, though, goes into the meeting after nearly seven months of war in Ukraine that has strained Russia's economic and military power in the biggest confrontation with the West since the height of the Cold War.

Russia's paramount leader has yet to comment publicly on lightning rout of his forces in north-eastern Ukraine. read more

XI AND PUTIN

The deepening Xi-Putin partnership is considered one of the most significant developments in geopolitics after China's own spectacular rise over the past 40 years.

Once the leader in the global Communist hierarchy, Russia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union is now a junior partner to a resurgent China which is forecast to overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy in the next decade.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin disembarks from the plane as he arrives for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan September 15, 2022. Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan/Handout via REUTERS

Xi, the son of Communist revolutionary whose has praised the jewels of Russian literature in public, and Putin, who grew up in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, and came of age in the Soviet-era KGB, say their relations have never been better.

Though Russia and China have in the past been rivals and have fought wars, Putin and Xi share a view of the world which sees the West as decadent and in decline just as China challenges the United States' supremacy.

The visit "shows that China is willing to not only continue 'business as usual' with Russia but even show explicit support and accelerate the formation of a stronger China-Russia alignment," said Alexander Korolev, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

As Europe tries to turn away from Russian oil and gas, Putin will seek to boost energy exports to China and Asia, possibly with a pipeline through Mongolia. Putin, Xi and Mongolian President Ukhnaa Khurelsukh are due to hold a three-way meeting in Samarkand. read more

INDIA, IRAN

In Uzbekistan, Xi and Putin will attend a summit of The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a security bloc comprising Russia, China, India, Pakistan and four of Central Asian states. read more

Iran on Thursday signed a memorandum on joining the SCO. Putin said a delegation of 80 large Russian companies would visit Iran next week. read more

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Xi will come face-to-face on Friday for the first time since deadly border clashes in 2020 frayed ties between the Asian rivals. read more

"At the SCO summit, I look forward to exchanging views on topical, regional and international issues, the expansion of SCO and on further deepening of multifaceted and mutually beneficial cooperation within the organisation," Modi said in a statement.

Russia has already confirmed a bilateral meeting between Putin and Modi, during which they are expected to talk about overall trade as well as sales of Russian fertilisers and mutual food supplies. read more

Putin will also meet Iranian, Kyrgyz, Pakistani, Turkmen and Uzbek leaders. On Friday, Putin is also set to meet the leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkey, the Kremlin said.

Writing by Olzhas Auyezov and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Raissa Kasolowsky and Tomasz Janowski

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Mukhammadsharif Mamatkulov

​

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com