Quotes of the Day:
“In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and antisemitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories. Or, the grotesque disparity between cause and effect which introduced the era of imperialism, when economic difficulties led, in a few decades, to a profound transformation of political conditions all over the world. Or, the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements’ avowed cynical “realism” and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. Or, the irritating incompatibility between the actual power-of modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their own strength has established.”
— The Origins Of Totalitarianism (Harvest Book Book 244) by Hannah Arendt
https://a.co/7Ys57Ey
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread."
- Viktor E. Frankl
"Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues."
- Abigail Adams
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 23 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Does Ukraine Change Everything?
3. Opinion | Meet Alexander Dugin, author of Putin’s deadly playbook
4. Exclusive: Inside a rare US meeting with a Russian general in Moscow
5. What If Russia Makes a Deal? How to End a War That No One Is Likely to Win
6. Can the Korean War point the way out of the killing in Ukraine?
7. Top Russian military leaders repeatedly decline calls from U.S., prompting fears of ‘sleepwalking into war’
8. NATO members to pledge support for Ukraine against potential chem-bio attacks
9. Leaked documents suggest plans for Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands
10. White House to Seek $813.3 Billion National Security Budget
11. Multidomain operations concept will become doctrine this summer
12. How Russia's warfare doctrine is failing in Ukraine
13. The Money Question: How Long Can Russia Wage War Against Ukraine?
14. Our Elites Need to Recognize that America’s ‘Unipolar Moment’ is Over
15. U.S. Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons
16. Ukraine War Update - March 24, 2022 | SOF News
17. NATO: Up to 40,000 Russian Troops Killed, Wounded, Taken Prisoner or Missing in Ukraine
18. NATO: 7,000 to 15,000 Russian troops dead in Ukraine
19. War Crimes by Russia’s Forces in Ukraine
20. IntelBrief: How Will Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Impact its Influence Abroad?
21. Putin’s Afghanistan: Ukraine and the Lessons of the Soviets’ Afghan War
22. Don’t Underestimate the Bear—Russia Is One of the World’s Most Effective Modern Counterinsurgents
23. The will to fight in the age of social media
24. As allies meet, splits emerge in NATO about how to deter Russia
25. Why Russian generals keep getting killed in Ukraine
1.RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 23 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 23 (PUTIN'S WAR)
Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 23, 5:00pm ET
Russian forces continued to settle in for a protracted and stalemated conflict over the last 24 hours, with more reports emerging of Russian troops digging in and laying mines—indications that they have gone over to the defensive. Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited and effective counterattacks to relieve pressure on Kyiv, although the extent of those counterattacks is likely less than what some Ukrainian officials are claiming. Russian efforts to mobilize additional forces to keep their offensive moving continue to be halting and limited. Russian progress in taking Mariupol city remains slow and grinding. Increasing Russian emphasis on using air, artillery, and rocket/missile bombardments of Ukrainian cities to offset forward offensive momentum raises the urgency of providing Ukraine with systems to defend against these attacks.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces continue to go over to the defensive, conducting restricted and localized ground attacks that make little progress.
- Ukrainian forces are conducting limited and successful counterattacks around Kyiv to disrupt Russian operations to encircle the city (which has now become extremely unlikely) and relieve the pressure on the capital.
- The Battle of Mariupol continues as a block-by-block struggle with fierce Ukrainian resistance and limited Russian gains.
- Russia is likely struggling to obtain fresh combat power from Syria and elsewhere rapidly.
Russian efforts to bring Syrian forces into Ukraine may be encountering challenges. Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) reports that a Russian commander in Syria met with the commander of the Syrian Arab Army’s 8th Brigade to request a list of Syrian personnel ready to fight in Ukraine, but that the Syrian commander promised only to respond after consulting with his colleagues.[1] We have no independent verification of this report. ISW’s Middle East Team is preparing a brief report on Russian efforts to mobilize Syrian forces to support the war in Ukraine and will publish it in the coming days.
Russian mobilization efforts are likely becoming urgent given Russian losses in the war. The Wall Street Journal cites an unnamed NATO official claiming that Russia has lost as many as 40,000 troops killed, wounded, or missing of the roughly 190,000 deployed to invade Ukraine.[2] That assessment, which is plausible given previous estimates of Russian combat deaths, must be considered in the context of the assessment offered by an unnamed Department of Defense official on March 21 that Russia had committed a high proportion of its available battalion tactical groups to the war already.[3] The protracting pause of Russian offensive operations in Ukraine and increasing anecdotal reporting of breakdowns in the morale and capability of Russian combat units all accord with these assessments. These reports and assessments collectively suggest that Russia may not be able to find new combat power with which to regain offensive momentum for weeks or even months.
Russian forces are increasingly preparing for protracted defensive operations in various parts of the theater. Numerous reports and satellite images of Russian troops digging defensive positions and laying mines suggest that they have gone over to the defensive and do not anticipate conducting renewed large-scale offensive operations in the near future in a number of locations across Ukraine.
We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are 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.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk Oblast;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
Ukrainian forces have launched counterattacks to regain territory occupied by Russian troops, liberating the town of Makariv as noted in the update of March 22. The counterattack, probably conducted primarily by Ukrainian forces from the west of the forwardmost Russian positions, has likely made more significant progress than our map of March 22 showed. We have updated our map considerably since March 22 to show our current assessment of the probable front line west of Kyiv. Some of the Ukrainian gains shown likely occurred on March 21, but we have only just acquired sufficient evidence and clarity on the Ukrainian operations to reflect them accurately in the map of March 23.
Local Ukrainian officials claimed on March 23 that Ukrainian forces have encircled Russian troops in Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel.[4] The mayor of Kyiv claimed that Ukrainian troops have almost pushed Russian forces out of Irpin.[5] The mayor of Irpin claimed that Ukrainian forces controlled 80% of the city as of March 23 but noted that the Russians continue to fire mortars and Grad rockets at the town and that Russian saboteurs and looters are pervasive.[6]
We are unable to corroborate most of these claims, particularly the claimed encirclement of large groups of Russian forces or the liberation of Irpin. The head of the Kyiv Oblast military administration stated on March 22 that Russian forces still controlled Bucha and Hostomel, that Ukrainian forces could conduct only local counterattacks, and that Ukrainian troops were preparing for a larger offensive operation—all of which would suggest that Ukrainian troops have likely not yet encircled Russian troops in these areas.[7] These Ukrainian claims may reflect the expectation that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will continue and cut off Russian forces currently in the Irpin salient. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and update our assessment and map if and when we find clear corroborating evidence of these claimed Ukrainian advances.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 23 that Russian forces attempted to advance on Teterivsk, roughly 70 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, but were repelled.[8] A local Ukrainian government social media report supports that assessment.[9]
Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Fighting in and around Chernihiv has continued over the past several days without changing the front line materially.[10]
Russian forces did not attempt new advances in and around Kyiv’s eastern suburbs in the past 24 hours. The Ukrainian General Staff reports that the Russians are continuing to dig themselves in and mine the area, likely indicating that the Russians have gone over to the defensive in these areas.[11]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
Russian forces did not conduct any significant offensive operations around Kharkiv or around the city of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, on March 23 although limited operations continued.[12]
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk Oblast:
Russian forces continued efforts to advance in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, concentrating on limited ground attacks on Popasna and Avdiivka and missile strikes on Kramatorsk airfield.[13]
Note: We have updated our map of northeastern Ukraine to show Russian control over considerably more terrain than we had previously assessed. This change reflects newly acquired historical data rather than new Russian gains. We do NOT assess that Russian forces have made significant territorial gains in northeastern Ukraine for several days, and the revised control of terrain in this part of the theater does NOT reflect new Russian advances or the consolidation of Russian control.
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast:
Block-by-block fighting continued in Mariupol City, as Russian forces increased their bombardment using artillery, drones, and naval guns.[14] Russian troops made limited gains.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westward:
Russian forces in and around Kherson and Mykolayiv, as well as those advancing on Kryvyih Ryh and Zaporizhiya, did not conduct significant offensive operations in the past 24 hours.[15] Ukrainian military intelligence reported that Russian forces are preparing to block the Kerch Bridge to prevent Russians from leaving Crimea.[16] The GUR claims that this measure is a response to panic among Russians in Crimea, particularly those who moved to the peninsula after 2014, especially among the families of Russian military and government personnel. We have no independent verification of these GUR reports.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks.
- Russia will expand its air, missile, and artillery bombardments of Ukrainian cities.
- Ukrainian officials suggest that Ukrainian forces may launch a larger counterattack in western Kyiv Oblast in the coming days.
- The continued involvement of the Black Sea Fleet in the Battle of Mariupol reduces the likelihood of an amphibious landing near Odesa, Russian naval shelling of Odesa in recent days notwithstanding.
[2] NATO Estimates Steep Russian Losses in Ukraine as Biden Heads to Europe - WSJ
[3] Senior Defense Official Holds a Background Briefing > U.S. Department of Defense > Transcript
[7] https://t dot me/stranaua/32219
[9] https://t dot me/chernigivskaODA/602
2. Does Ukraine Change Everything?
No one is ten feet tall.
Are we at an inflection point?
Excerpt:
The Ukraine crisis poses an enormous challenge to China. It will doubtless perceive some near- term political gains from the shift in U.S. and world attention. If China remains fixated on its rivalry with the United States, it might support Russia. But allegedly China thinks in the long term. Russia is failing in Ukraine and becoming a global pariah. If China wants to save Putin from himself and present itself as a beneficent global power, it will need to help broker a settlement in Ukraine. Acting in its own interests, China could facilitate a solution to the Ukraine crisis. This might encourage China and the United States to consider a reset. That would result in the birth of at least one miracle in our time!
Does Ukraine Change Everything?
Whatever the final results in Ukraine, Russia has shown itself to be far less than a great power.
The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne said in his wonderfully ironic way, “I have seen the birth of several miracles in my time.” We too have witnessed several turning points, one miraculous and one diabolical, after which we were told that “nothing would ever be the same again”: the end of the Cold War and 9/11. Hegel was right, the owl of Minerva only sets sail after sunset. It takes a long time to evaluate the historical meaning of such events.
9/11, the American responses, and their repercussions appear to be a one-off. In geostrategic terms, the end of the Cold War was far more important. Yet it too turned out to be ephemeral, since the issues supposedly resolved by the end of the Cold War have been reopened with violence by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We are now faced with daunting questions that will take years to answer. What kind of Russia will we face after the Ukraine invasion? What will be its reach in Europe? Will Europe move towards greater unity, including in the realm of defense, because of the Ukraine crisis? How will China respond and what will be its role in a changed international environment?
Russia’s boundaries have ebbed and flowed in the course of centuries. At times, Western states have put stock in and sometimes feared the “Russian steamroller.” But Russia usually has had difficulty in mobilizing its forces effectively. It has been best in defensive war, defeating Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler with the help of General Winter. Yet it has failed at other times, and its failures have often unleashed domestic crises: the Crimean War led to the end of serfdom; the 1904-5 war against Japan was the dress rehearsal of revolution; World War I brought about the collapse of the Tsarist regime. In all three cases, Russia was ill-prepared, had a backward and sometimes corrupt military, and an authoritarian but incompetent political leadership. It turned out to be much weaker than it seemed. As a result of war, its territorial boundaries shifted. For example, after World War I, Poland was recreated largely out of Russian territory, as were the Baltic states. After the end of communism, the soviet republics became independent.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and especially in the last decade, Russia has reasserted its influence in the old Soviet republics. Some of these states were barely viable, some were unpopular dictatorships, some were at odds with their neighbors, and some faced opposition from ethnic minorities. Russia intervened to save Alexander Lukashenko from his own people, thereby making Belarus a fief; did likewise for the Kazakh regime; “protected” Ossetians and Abkhazians to undermine Georgia, which had veered too far towards the United States; and inserted its forces as “peacekeepers” between Armenia and Azerbaijan. At the same time, Russia meddled in other parts of the world, like Libya, sub-Saharan Africa, and Syria, suffering little pushback. Perhaps most important, it seized Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014 at small cost and with only a slap on the wrist from the West. This impunity must have convinced Vladimir Putin that he could get away with attacking Ukraine. But this time he didn’t succeed.
Whatever the final results in Ukraine, Russia has shown itself to be far less than a great power. Putin’s total control over the state provides him no alibis for failure, for lack of grand strategic thinking and for poor military preparedness. It’s astonishing how Ukraine has shown itself to be far more sophisticated in its strategy, tactics, and weaponry than Russia. Mass terror bombing of cities and civilians will convince no one of Russia’s prowess. Nor would the use of chemical or nuclear weapons redeem its reputation.
A few weeks ago, at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Russia could plausibly claim to be a co-equal great power in its relationship to China, now it looks more like a would-be Chinese satrapy. The Russian economy and financial system have been devastated. Russia has garnered international obloquy and contempt. Even if Russia “wins” in Ukraine, it has lost in all other respects. But Russia will not disappear, it will not cease to be a problem; nor does experience give us confidence that it will change into something better.
What has changed is that Europe has awakened from its dream of a pacific world based on rule of law and has been thrust back into a world of blood and iron. Thrust back into a world in which NATO and the United States are still essential. Yet in the recent actions of the German government, for example, it is possible to imagine that Europe will have no choice but to become a complete great power because in a violent world with a dangerous Russian neighbor and an America that wants eventually to pivot to Asia, Europe must be able to defend itself. The modalities of a Europe of Defense will have to be worked out but for once, it looks like they may go beyond talk. Throughout the modern era, Europe was a heavily armed and militarized continent, but its militaries were pitted against each other. Now it may return to the pursuit of power, but united. That would be something new.
Another something new could be the impact of the Ukraine crisis on energy policy; it may catalyze Europe’s pursuit of renewables. For some time, the EU has recognized the imperatives of transition to new forms of energy, but Russian gas and oil were so convenient and cost-effective. Is it imaginable that Europe can remain reliant on energy from a dangerous Russian? Hardly! Initially, it will have to seek other sources of fossil fuel to replace Russian, but it will almost certainly embark on a crash program to solve both its need for dependable energy and its desire to mitigate climate change: alternative energies on a large scale; probably nuclear in the mix. Like defense, energy will require “more Europe” (and the ill-timed “Global Britain” will be mostly beside the point).
The Ukraine crisis poses an enormous challenge to China. It will doubtless perceive some near- term political gains from the shift in U.S. and world attention. If China remains fixated on its rivalry with the United States, it might support Russia. But allegedly China thinks in the long term. Russia is failing in Ukraine and becoming a global pariah. If China wants to save Putin from himself and present itself as a beneficent global power, it will need to help broker a settlement in Ukraine. Acting in its own interests, China could facilitate a solution to the Ukraine crisis. This might encourage China and the United States to consider a reset. That would result in the birth of at least one miracle in our time!
Steven Philip Kramer is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
3. Opinion | Meet Alexander Dugin, author of Putin’s deadly playbook
Excerpt:
Putin has followed that counsel to the letter, and he must have felt things were going well when he saw window-smashing rioters in the corridors of the U.S. Congress, Britain’s Brexit from the European Union and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas. With the undermining of the West going so well, Putin has turned to the pages of Dugin’s text in which he declared: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia,” and “without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”
Opinion | Meet Alexander Dugin, author of Putin’s deadly playbook
On the eve of his murderous invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a long and rambling discourse denying the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians, a speech many Western analysts found strange and untethered. Strange, yes. Untethered, no. The analysis came directly from the works of a fascist prophet of maximal Russian empire named Aleksandr Dugin.
Dugin’s intellectual influence over the Russian leader is well known to close students of the post-Soviet period, among whom Dugin, 60, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain.” His work is also familiar to Europe’s “new right,” of which Dugin has been a leading figure for nearly three decades, and to America’s “alt-right.” Indeed, the Russian-born former wife of the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, Nina Kouprianova, has translated some of Dugin’s work into English.
But as the world watches with horror and disgust the indiscriminate bombing of Ukraine, a broader understanding is needed of Dugin’s deadly ideas. Russia has been running his playbook for the past 20 years, and it has brought us here, to the brink of another world war.
A product of late-period Soviet decline, Dugin belongs to the long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past — infused with mysticism and obedient to authority — to explain a failed present. The future lies in reclaiming this past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people). Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”
Dugin tells essentially the same story from a Russian point of view. Before modernity ruined everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, appropriately ruled by ethnic Russians. Alas, a competing sea-based empire of corrupt, money-grubbing individualists, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s destiny and brought “Eurasia” — his term for the future Russian empire — low.
In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.
Putin has followed that counsel to the letter, and he must have felt things were going well when he saw window-smashing rioters in the corridors of the U.S. Congress, Britain’s Brexit from the European Union and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas. With the undermining of the West going so well, Putin has turned to the pages of Dugin’s text in which he declared: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia,” and “without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”
So what comes next, should Putin manage to “resolve” Russia’s “problem” in Ukraine? Dugin envisions a gradual dividing of Europe into zones of German and Russian influence, with Russia very much in charge thanks to its eventual stranglehold over Germany’s resource needs. As Great Britain crumbles and Russia picks up the pieces, the empire of Eurasia will ultimately stretch, in Dugin’s words, “from Dublin to Vladisvostok.”
Putin’s double-dealing encroachments into the Middle East are influenced by Dugin’s idea of a Moscow-Tehran axis. (Israel’s government should wake up, smell the samovar and stop playing footsie with Russia.) His seduction of the nationalist government in New Delhi is a reflection of Dugin’s insistence that the Eurasian empire must extend to the Indian Ocean.
As important as it is for Western decision-makers to take Dugin’s mystical megalomania seriously, it’s just as urgent for China’s Xi Jinping. Xi and Putin announced a partnership last month to cut the United States down to size. But according to Dugin, China, too, must fall. Russia’s ambitions in Asia will require “the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state,” Dugin writes. Russia’s natural partner in the Far East, according to Dugin, is Japan.
In a sense, Dugin’s 600-page doorstop can be boiled down to one idea: The wrong alliance won World War II. If only Hitler had not invaded Russia, Britain could have been broken. The United States would have remained at home, isolationist and divided, and Japan would have ruled the former China as Russia’s junior partner.
Fascism from Ireland to the Pacific. Delusional? I sure hope so. But delusions become important when embraced by tyrants.
4. Exclusive: Inside a rare US meeting with a Russian general in Moscow
Good work by a US Foriegn Area Officer (FAO). The public rarely and almost never has access to the type of reporting FAOs provide. They can provide valuable insights that cannot be collected by technical means.
Excerpts:
As the meeting was breaking up, one US defense attaché "casually inquired" about Ilyin's family roots in Ukraine, and the Russian general's "stoic demeanor suddenly became flushed and agitated," according to the readout. The Americans reported Ilyin responded "yes," and said that he was born in Dnipropetrovsk before moving with his family moving to Donetsk, where he went to school.
But the US officials reported Ilyin then added that the current situation in Ukraine is "tragic and I am very depressed over it" -- and then he walked out without shaking hands, according to the readout.
It's unclear why the meeting was held or the circumstances behind it. CNN does not know if there's additional documentation describing the meeting. The readout does not include the names of the American attachés in the meeting, and CNN has been unable to learn their identities. The Pentagon and State Department declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.
The US team had the sense, according to the readout, that Ilyin stopped just short of accusing US and Ukraine of atrocities against his family. It's not clear what specifically caused them to reach that conclusion, but one of the attachés said, "The fire in his eyes and flustered demeanor left a chill down the spine."
The readout said one of the attaché's jaw dropped, and both Americans reported they had never "witnessed such an outburst by Russian counterparts at an official meeting."
US meetings with Russian officials are typically scripted affairs. While it's not clear from the summary what precisely led to Ilyin's reaction, the two US defense attachés who attended the meeting assessed the general's reaction as a possible sign of morale problems.
"At the very least, it is clear that morale problems among Russian forces are not limited to front-line troops," the readout concludes.
Exclusive: Inside a rare US meeting with a Russian general in Moscow
CNN · by Barbara Starr and Jeremy Herb, CNN
(CNN)A rare face-to-face meeting between Russian and US military officials last week led to an "outburst" of emotion from a normally stoic Russian general, a "revealing moment" that the Americans present believe hinted at larger morale problems in Russia's military, according to a closely held US military readout of what transpired.
The readout, which was reviewed by CNN, describes the perspective of the two defense attachés who attended and their own impressions of what they saw and heard. It does not offer a definitive explanation of the Russian general's behavior. Readouts of sensitive meetings are never made public by the military or intelligence community because they are scrutinized for clues about an adversary's thinking and intentions.
The meeting, held at the Russian ministry of defense in Moscow, is a rare instance of Russian and American defense officials sitting down in person since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. The readout describes the meeting as tense, with visible signs of stress on the Russian side.
It makes particular note of the behavior of Russian Major General Yevgeny Ilyin, deputy chief of the main directorate of international cooperation who has a long track record of dealing with American officials. In a break from typical practice, Ilyin spoke with no notes or set talking points, according to the readout.
As the meeting was breaking up, one US defense attaché "casually inquired" about Ilyin's family roots in Ukraine, and the Russian general's "stoic demeanor suddenly became flushed and agitated," according to the readout. The Americans reported Ilyin responded "yes," and said that he was born in Dnipropetrovsk before moving with his family moving to Donetsk, where he went to school.
Read More
But the US officials reported Ilyin then added that the current situation in Ukraine is "tragic and I am very depressed over it" -- and then he walked out without shaking hands, according to the readout.
It's unclear why the meeting was held or the circumstances behind it. CNN does not know if there's additional documentation describing the meeting. The readout does not include the names of the American attachés in the meeting, and CNN has been unable to learn their identities. The Pentagon and State Department declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.
The US team had the sense, according to the readout, that Ilyin stopped just short of accusing US and Ukraine of atrocities against his family. It's not clear what specifically caused them to reach that conclusion, but one of the attachés said, "The fire in his eyes and flustered demeanor left a chill down the spine."
The readout said one of the attaché's jaw dropped, and both Americans reported they had never "witnessed such an outburst by Russian counterparts at an official meeting."
US meetings with Russian officials are typically scripted affairs. While it's not clear from the summary what precisely led to Ilyin's reaction, the two US defense attachés who attended the meeting assessed the general's reaction as a possible sign of morale problems.
"At the very least, it is clear that morale problems among Russian forces are not limited to front-line troops," the readout concludes.
A glimpse into US-Russia military relations
The readout provides a peek behind the scenes of a Russian military that has failed in its apparent goal of quickly taking Kyiv after launching the invasion last month. Senior US military officials have said publicly and privately that the morale of Russian military forces is suffering as they enter the fourth week of their invasion of Ukraine -- an invasion that US officials think Russian President Vladimir Putin believed would go much more quickly and smoothly than it has.
In an interview Tuesday with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov disputed US assessments that Russian troops had morale problems. "You would probably have to doubt this information," Peskov said. "You have to doubt it, and you have to think twice whether it is true or not."
The Kremlin has continued since well before the invasion to refuse direct high-level contact between senior US generals and Russian counterparts making this meeting one of increased interest. The US has a deconfliction phone line of communication with the Russian military that has been tested daily but has not been used.
The US believes that the refusal for high-level meetings is due to Kremlin worries that the encounters would show them to be vulnerable if they allowed such meetings, because it risks a tacit admission that an abnormal situation exists, according to the readout.
Even before the remarkable end to the meeting, the US officials reported that Ilyin's stoicism began to wilt in the meeting when the Americans called the Ukraine situation a crisis, and the Russian general quickly "corrected and countermanded" them.
The Russian general did not deviate in the discussions from the win-at-all-costs Russian strategy of the invasion of Ukraine, according to the readout. In this instance, the two Americans believe they witnessed a Russian general who was "clearly in distress over the situation but who had nowhere to project his anger except in line with Kremlin's state sponsored narrative," according to the readout.
The readout notes the Americans are not discounting the encounter may have underscored the hardening of the Russian position on the war and the Russian military officials' need to fulfill their orders because they have no other choice.
A senior defense official said last week that the US has "picked up anecdotal indications that morale is not high" in some of the Russian forces' military units.
"We certainly have indications that morale is a growing problem inside the Russian forces that are fighting in Ukraine," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Tuesday. "As time goes on, and they continue to fail to achieve the progress on the ground that they want to achieve, we've seen increasing indications that morale and unit cohesion is a problem."
CNN's Devan Cole contributed to this report.
CNN · by Barbara Starr and Jeremy Herb, CNN
5. What If Russia Makes a Deal? How to End a War That No One Is Likely to Win.
Excerpts:
YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT
Perhaps the parties will strike a grand bargain favorable to Ukraine, if Russia continues significant battlefield losses. More likely, however, this war will admit no easily sustainable peace. If Russia yields, it will probably yield to a provisional peace. Putin does not seem capable of learning from his mistakes. Yet a provisional peace that preserves Zelensky’s government, brings about a lasting cease-fire, and does not permanently infringe on Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and autonomy (as Kyiv defines the terms) may be attainable. As unjust as it would be, it is preferable to all the actual alternatives.
The war has rendered Russia’s foreign policy untenable. Putin is pursuing ambitions that the Russian economy and the Russian polity will not be able to realize. Although Putin will not fundamentally recalibrate, Russia cannot escape the fact that its ends outstrip its means. At some point, Putin will meet his political Waterloo as a result of this war. And when the consequences of his overreach descend on Moscow and the dictator departs, Ukraine’s chance for a peace that is more than provisional may at long last come into view.
What If Russia Makes a Deal?
How to End a War That No One Is Likely to Win
March 23, 2022
The twentieth century’s two world wars are an endless source of precedents and analogies. The lead-up to World War II produced the Munich analogy, an allusion to the 1938 British and French decision to permit Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. “Munich” has become shorthand for “appeasement.” The aftermath of the war produced the Nuremberg analogy, a reference to the public trials of the surviving leaders of the utterly defeated Nazi regime. “Nuremberg” now stands for “unconditional surrender.”
By contrast, the conclusion of World War I had been unclear and incomplete. Berlin did not fall in November 1918. Instead, the government waging the war dissolved; Kaiser Wilhelm went into exile. The harsh terms of the peace—the reparations and the attribution of guilt to Germany—became the preconditions for Adolf Hitler’s rise and for the outbreak of World War II. This is the story of “Versailles”: shorthand for a peace agreement that begets further war.
The question now is what kind of ending Europe’s first major twenty-first-century war will feature. The Roman statesman and scholar Cicero argued that an unjust peace is better than a just war. Ongoing negotiations between Ukraine and Russia will put that proposition to the test.
The Ukrainians’ brave resistance has halted the Russian advance. In ordering an invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin acted impulsively. Were he now to think strategically, he would cut his losses and look for a way to finish the war. His larger political aims are already out of reach. He cannot control Ukraine and will struggle to partition a country opposed to Russian occupation. Moscow has only an expensive and forbidding military path ahead of it, which together with sanctions will place sizable burdens on Putin’s regime. But whatever happens in Ukraine, Russia will still be a nuclear power, and it will retain Europe’s largest conventional military.
In this war, there will be no Munich, no Nuremberg, and no Versailles.
Ukraine has mounted a formidable defense, but it cannot reverse Russia’s overall military dominance or stop its shelling and bombing of civilians and of military targets. Ukraine’s diplomatic balancing act—between retaining its sovereignty and terminating a cruel war—will be exceptionally difficult. Weapons from the United States and its European allies will strengthen Ukraine’s negotiation position. But without their direct involvement in the war, which is not going to materialize, Ukraine will not enjoy an outright victory and Russia will not suffer an outright defeat.
If they reach a negotiated deal, Ukraine and Russia will both have to settle for partial and fragile gains. In this war, there will be no Munich, no Nuremberg, and no Versailles.
Recent history provides another (not very encouraging) analogy for the parties: the Minsk analogy, which alludes to the agreements negotiated in that Belarusian city in 2014 and 2015 in a bid to end fighting between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists that was the prequel to the current war. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine proved the inadequacy of the Minsk agreements, which represented a form of crisis management that irritated everyone and satisfied no one, deferring and perhaps even exacerbating Ukraine’s fundamental problems.
The United States and Europe are not at war with Russia and cannot apply either the Nuremberg or the Versailles models to this particular European conflict. Their mission, thus, is to do better than Minsk. Western sanctions on Russia and military assistance for Ukraine provide genuine leverage. Washington and its European allies should use and expand this leverage in proportion to Russia’s continuing violations of Ukrainian sovereignty. The transatlantic alliance can dictate nothing to Putin. It can only assist Ukraine in navigating its way to a probably unsatisfactory peace. This humbling reality must be the starting point for policy and diplomacy.
WHY MINSK FAILED
Through the Minsk negotiations, Putin was hoping to ensure Ukrainian neutrality on Russian terms and to compromise Ukrainian sovereignty by creating a semiautonomous zone in the country’s east. Instead, after the Minsk agreements were hammered out, Ukraine forged closer and closer ties with the United States, NATO, and western European countries. A line of contact formed in country’s east between Ukraine proper and a netherland under Russian control. At considerable cost, Russia had acquired territory that gave it no real leverage over Ukraine’s geopolitical future.
Meanwhile, the United States and European countries imposed sanctions on Russia, pledging not to lift them until Russia withdrew its military from eastern Ukraine and ended the war, even though Russia remained unvanquished on the battlefield. Putin could not normalize relations with the United States and its allies unless he implemented the Minsk accords on their terms, which he had no intention of doing. But the sanctions were not destabilizing for Russia, and were not powerful enough to coerce Moscow accept the West’s terms.
Minsk’s failure has many authors. The signatories to the agreements were France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. Paris and Berlin were rhetorically committed to the deal but did little to enforce it, and the effect of sanctions weakened with each passing year. Washington was equally complacent and lazy. U.S. military assistance flowed into Ukraine when the administration of President Donald Trump agreed to provide lethal military aid—with enough strings attached for Trump to get impeached for his manipulative relations with Ukraine. Yet despite earlier promises, Ukraine was never given the opportunity to join NATO or any other alliance: no treaty commitment from the United States or from another major outside power ever emerged.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February was driven by a revanchist vision of Ukraine’s historical ties to Russia and from his self-appointed mission to terminate Ukrainian statehood. But the invasion was also inspired by Putin’s more practical frustration with Minsk. Although the Russian military had won its battles in 2014 and 2015, the Kremlin was losing the war for Ukraine’s future. Putin believed that swiftly toppling the government in Kyiv would transform this state of affairs and pull Ukraine back toward Russia, punishing Kyiv’s European and U.S. partners. As he saw it, an invasion would not result in a wider war because Europe and the United States were only superficially committed to Ukraine. Had they been truly committed, they would not have let Minsk lapse into irrelevance.
BROKEN PROMISES
Ukraine’s surprise success has made the Kremlin rethink its war aims. Putin began the invasion with the maximalist goal of toppling the Ukrainian government. The point of the war was to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, in Putin’s bizarre parlance, which meant regime change. Given Russia’s immense battlefield losses, taking Kyiv may have become impossible for Russian forces, and by scaling back talk of the de-Nazification, Putin has signaled that he might accept Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as a legitimate counterpart in negotiations. But this may also be a trap for Kyiv, a pause before Russia returns to an escalatory set of demands. Putin will at any rate use whatever territory that Russian forces have occupied in recent weeks as a bargaining chip.
Putin likely has three core aims at this point. One is to formalize Crimea’s incorporation into Russia, a signature achievement of his presidency in Putin’s eyes. Perhaps the annexation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, only a part of which were occupied before the 2022 invasion, will get folded into this demand. Relatedly, Russia may also push for a land bridge from Moldova to Mariupol, depending on how the war goes.
A second aim is to establish Ukraine’s neutrality, which could mean either its inability to join NATO and to enter into the treaty alliances of its choosing or its “demilitarization,” as Putin has put it, presumably the elimination of its military capacity. Indeed, Putin might seek both of those outcomes. In a less drastic scenario, neutrality could also mean limitations on certain weapons systems and the prohibition of foreign bases in Ukraine. Finally, Putin will want to constrain or to block Ukraine’s integration into European institutions, especially those tied to the European Union.
Zelensky will have to measure an unjust peace against a just but devastating war.
For his part, Zelensky wants to secure his country’s full sovereignty and autonomy. In theory, this would entail the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, the return of Crimea to Ukraine, and the freedom to deepen economic relationships with the United States and Europe. Those outcomes, however, would require Russia to lose the war. Whereas Putin cannot be trusted to honor the documents he signs and should not be given concessions for his criminal war, he cannot be removed from the negotiations. Russia has at its disposal the threat of chemical and biological weapons and tactical nuclear weapons, not to mention the application of further conventional military force. Under this dark shadow, Zelensky must determine the degree of compromise he can condone and that Ukrainian citizens will accept. He will have to measure the imperatives of an unjust peace against those of a just but devastating war.
Zelensky has some leeway on Crimea and NATO membership. Russia’s annexation of Crimea was an illegal violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. Yet Russia, and not just Putin’s Russia, is unlikely to ever return it to Ukraine. Also, Crimea may matter less to Ukrainians than other parts of the country currently under Russia’s partial control, which could make a de facto acceptance of Russian control easier. And although NATO may decide to accept Sweden or Finland as members, it will not accept Ukraine—despite prior promises to do so. Zelensky has indicated his willingness to consider alternatives besides NATO membership, and has asked the West for security guarantees—that is, promises to enforce any potential agreement with Russia, ensuring that any deal would not amount to empty words.
For Kyiv, legally binding security guarantees—involving the United States, Russia, European countries, and potentially Turkey, as well—are crucial. Such guarantees would be the equivalent of extending NATO’s Article 5 to Ukraine: committing to go to war if Ukraine’s sovereignty or the terms of any potential agreement between Ukraine and Russia were violated. Such a pledge would certainly be a dramatic and precedent-defying step for the United States and its allies, which have tried to avoid being dragged into the war. Putin may not agree to it—or he may not agree to it in good faith. But binding guarantees—in contrast to the unenforced Budapest memorandum of 1994, which Russia first violated in 2014 by seizing Crimea—would furnish all sides with a solution to the essential problem of Ukraine’s security. Real bilateral or multilateral security guarantees would be better than NATO’s policy of having an open door in general but a closed door for Ukraine. Putin could sell this solution—the foreclosure of any chance that Ukraine would ever join NATO—as a win. At the same time, a U.S.-backed security guarantee to Ukraine could deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again.
YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT
Perhaps the parties will strike a grand bargain favorable to Ukraine, if Russia continues significant battlefield losses. More likely, however, this war will admit no easily sustainable peace. If Russia yields, it will probably yield to a provisional peace. Putin does not seem capable of learning from his mistakes. Yet a provisional peace that preserves Zelensky’s government, brings about a lasting cease-fire, and does not permanently infringe on Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and autonomy (as Kyiv defines the terms) may be attainable. As unjust as it would be, it is preferable to all the actual alternatives.
The war has rendered Russia’s foreign policy untenable. Putin is pursuing ambitions that the Russian economy and the Russian polity will not be able to realize. Although Putin will not fundamentally recalibrate, Russia cannot escape the fact that its ends outstrip its means. At some point, Putin will meet his political Waterloo as a result of this war. And when the consequences of his overreach descend on Moscow and the dictator departs, Ukraine’s chance for a peace that is more than provisional may at long last come into view.
6. Can the Korean War point the way out of the killing in Ukraine?
Say no to DMZs.
We should remember that it was the UN Command that signed the Armistice with the aggressor(s) north Korea (and the Chinese People's Volunteers). South Korea (and the US) did not sign the Armistice. And of course the Armistice would not have been signed without the coercion of the US (Ike's threats)
Does this provide a model for Putin's War?
Can the Korean War point the way out of the killing in Ukraine?
Illustrated | iStock
Nobody really knows how to end the war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has thrown his own country into decline. Having committed Russia's prestige, power, and soldiers to combat in the name of "de-Nazifying" Ukraine, he can't very well end the invasion without something to show for it. And while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signaled his willingness to come to some sort of compromise, including giving up on his country's NATO aspirations, he also — understandably — remains defiant: "I'm ready for dialogue," he said last week. "We're not ready for capitulation."
A grinding, bloody stalemate without end seems possible.
"Weapons from the United States and its European allies will strengthen Ukraine's negotiation position. But without their direct involvement in the war, which is not going to materialize, Ukraine will not enjoy an outright victory and Russia will not suffer an outright defeat," Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage pointed out Wednesday at Foreign Affairs.
Perhaps the answer, then, is to end the war without really ending it.
It's been done before. Roughly 5 million people were killed in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953 before combat ended. But the war itself has never officially ended — instead, an armistice was signed in which both sides agreed to "insure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved." They stopped killing each other and kicked the problem of ending the war down the road.
They're still kicking. North Korea and South Korea, along with the United States and China, are still negotiating an end to the Korean War, nearly 70 years after the fighting ended. It's far from a perfect solution — technically, it's not a solution at all. North Korea remains dominated by a nuclear-armed authoritarian regime, the two countries still sometimes skirmish, and the whole situation is more than a little absurd: Everybody seems to want an official peace, but nobody really knows how to get there.
An uneasy peace is better than a hot war, however. More than 10 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes, cities like Mariupol are being bombed into ashes, and thousands of people on both sides are dying ugly, needless deaths. Zelensky can't want to see his people continue suffering, and Putin shouldn't want his embarrassment to continue indefinitely.
Ending the war permanently will take delicate negotiating and involve fraught compromises that nobody really likes. That's hard stuff. Some creative thinking and bargaining will be needed. The best thing for now is not to worry so much about a formal peace agreement, but to stop the fighting itself, as soon as possible.
7. Top Russian military leaders repeatedly decline calls from U.S., prompting fears of ‘sleepwalking into war’
Excerpts:
It remains unclear why Russia’s top generals have refused to hold calls with their U.S. counterparts.
“I suspect that the problem lies with the Russian insistence that this is a ‘special military operation’ and unwillingness to admit the real nature of the war,” said Angela Stent, a Russia scholar at Georgetown University who served as a senior intelligence officer in the Bush administration.
The generals may also be waiting on Putin’s approval to make the calls, given the high stakes of the conflict, and he may not be signing off, Charap said.
Another theory is that Putin may now view the United States as a determined adversary bent on his downfall and not worth engaging. Russian officials bristled at Biden calling Putin a “war criminal,” saying it could lead to a complete break in relations.
Top Russian military leaders repeatedly decline calls from U.S., prompting fears of ‘sleepwalking into war’
Repeated attempts by the United States’ top defense and military leaders to speak with their Russian counterparts have been rejected by Moscow for the last month, leaving the world’s two largest nuclear powers in the dark about explanations for military movements and raising fears of a major miscalculation or battlefield accident.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have tried to set up phone calls with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov but the Russians “have so far declined to engage,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement Wednesday.
The attempted calls by Austin and Milley, which have not previously been reported, come as Russia conducts operations near the borders of NATO members Poland and Romania while the United States and its European allies conduct air-policing operations over the Baltic Sea and pour weapons and equipment into Ukraine by ground transport.
Moscow and Washington maintain a deconfliction channel but current and former officials say contact from higher-ranking military leaders is needed to avoid unnecessary escalation or confusion.
“There is a high risk of escalation without the firebreak of direct contact between the most senior officials,” said James Stavridis, who served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013. “Very young people are flying in jets, operating warships, and conducting combat operations in the Ukrainian war. They are not seasoned diplomats, and their actions in the heat of operations can be misunderstood.”
“We must avoid a scenario of NATO and Russia sleepwalking into war because senior leaders can’t pick up a phone and explain to each other what is happening,” he added.
Russia’s recent use of hypersonic missiles and other sophisticated weaponry against targets in western Ukraine have underscored the threat of spillover into a broader confrontation.
“The risks are obviously elevated currently,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Russia is striking targets in western Ukraine, which are not far from the border with NATO members, and the Ukrainian Air Force apparently continues to operate from that region, which means there is a risk that its aircraft could be mistaken for NATO aircraft across the border.”
U.S. defense officials have described the deconfliction phone line as a tactical mechanism to avoid miscalculations, especially when it comes to protecting NATO airspace or territory, but its functionality can be limited.
“It’s not set up to be a complaint line where you can just call in and just grouse about stuff,” said a U.S. defense official this week when asked about whether anything had been communicated through the channel. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon.
Sam Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corporation, said calls by Austin and Milley serve a “fundamentally different purpose” than the deconfliction channel.
“One is about tactical accident avoidance. The other about strategic engagement,” he said. “It’s always important to maintain the strategic level to communicate our interests clearly and better understand theirs. When there’s no communication at that level, their worst-case assumptions, often based on poor information, are more likely to drive their behavior.”
As Russia’s battlefield setbacks become more pronounced and the conflict nears its second month, U.S. officials are concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin may escalate militarily in the hopes of changing the trajectory of the war. As more dangerous weaponry and tactics are deployed, the risks of a wider conflict grow.
“A nightmare scenario would be a Russian missile or attack aircraft that destroys a U.S. command post across the Polish-Ukrainian border,” said Stavridis, a retired admiral. “A local commander might respond immediately, thinking the event was a precursor to a wider attack. This could lead to rapid and irreversible escalation, to include potential use of nuclear weapons.”
Stavridis said when he was Supreme Allied Commander, he could dial his Russian counterpart anytime “and did on several occasions to clarify a situation and de-escalate.”
The Pentagon holds the view that engagement between the U.S. and Russian defense leaders is “critically importance at this time,” Kirby said. Besides the deconfliction channel, the United States and Russia can also engage through the defense attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow or the relaying of messages to the Ministry of Defense.
Communications between the United States and Russia have been much more sparse since the war began last month. The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, has met with Russian officials most frequently with on and off visits and calls in Moscow. President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, spoke to his counterpart, Nikolay Patrushev, last week for the first time since the start of the conflict. Some U.S. and Russian military officials met last week at the Russian Ministry of Defense, CNN first reported.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials.
It remains unclear why Russia’s top generals have refused to hold calls with their U.S. counterparts.
“I suspect that the problem lies with the Russian insistence that this is a ‘special military operation’ and unwillingness to admit the real nature of the war,” said Angela Stent, a Russia scholar at Georgetown University who served as a senior intelligence officer in the Bush administration.
The generals may also be waiting on Putin’s approval to make the calls, given the high stakes of the conflict, and he may not be signing off, Charap said.
Another theory is that Putin may now view the United States as a determined adversary bent on his downfall and not worth engaging. Russian officials bristled at Biden calling Putin a “war criminal,” saying it could lead to a complete break in relations.
Biden has sought to avoid a conflict by keeping U.S. troops out of Ukraine and U.S. aircraft out of its airspace.
“You’re talking about avoiding incidents with aircraft or at sea,” said Ben Hodges, a retired Army officer who served as commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe. “I’m sure they would’ve wanted to convey to Gerasimov and Shoigu that Russian pilots should not be launching missiles too close to the Polish border, but they would also want to talk about other places, not just Ukraine, where you have Russian aircraft.”
“I would also imagine they would want to convey — here’s what we’re doing, don’t interpret what we’re doing as a provocative act,” he added.
Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
8. NATO members to pledge support for Ukraine against potential chem-bio attacks
How can the Ukrainian people be protected? I assume that they are the likely target in Putin's War. There is probably not enough protective gear for all the Ukrainian people and of course no one can predict where Putin will strike with chemical weapons. Chemical defesne is hard.
NATO members to pledge support for Ukraine against potential chem-bio attacks
STUTTGART, Germany — NATO members plan to approve additional support for Ukraine in that country’s defense against Russia’s invasion, including equipment to counter a potential chemical or biological attack.
The support is crucial to protect the alliance’s own member nations, who would also suffer from contamination if Russia used a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapon against Ukraine, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday from Brussels, during a televised press conference.
“Any use of chemical weapons would totally change the nature of the conflict, and would be a blatant violation of international law and have far-reaching consequences,” Stoltenberg said. “I think that’s the most important message to convey, that any use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.”
Stoltenberg did not immediately provide details on what the CBRN support would include, saying it will be one of several discussion points during Thursday’s planned summit with leaders of the 30 member nations. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will virtually address the NATO leaders during the summit in a closed session.
Members are expected to approve new cybersecurity assistance for Ukraine, plus additional support for non-NATO members Georgia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The role of China in the Ukrainian conflict will also be discussed.
“Allies are concerned that China could provide material support for the Russian invasion,” Stoltenberg said.
Meanwhile, member nations have deployed four new NATO battle groups in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary, effectively doubling the number of groups positioned along the alliance’s eastern border. France has offered to lead the group in Romania, while the Czech Republic will lead the additional troops in Slovakia. Bulgaria and Hungary will lead the battlegroups in their respective countries, a NATO spokesperson told Defense News.
NATO has existing battle groups stationed in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, and together the eight battle groups will span NATO’s borders from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Stoltenberg said. There are now hundreds of thousands of NATO troops at high readiness alert across the alliance, to include 100,000 U.S. forces across Europe, and 40,000 forces directly under NATO command mostly in the eastern part of the alliance, he added.
Those battle groups will be in place “as long as is necessary,” and NATO is now deliberating how to position its troops for the long term.
“This invasion … will have long-term consequences for our security,” Stoltenberg said. “It’s a new normal for our security, and NATO has to respond to that new reality.”
Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said military advisers would present options in the next months for fresh troop commitments in the eastern alliance countries. That’s because the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which limits such deployments, is effectively out the window following Moscow’s war on Ukraine, she said.
“Russia is in clear violation” of the pact, Smith said Wednesday during remarks at an event sponsored by the Atlantic Council think tank.
Before making final troop-level recommendations, NATO analysts must take into account how the Ukraine war will develop, and how many forces Russia intends to leave in Belarus, she added.
Smith dampened expectations about a Polish proposal, to be discussed this week, for a NATO peace mission in Ukraine. While the idea is “not dead in the water,” she said it poses many “open questions” and would ultimately run up against a pledge by U.S. President Joe Biden and other alliance leaders to refrain from sending troops to Ukraine.
Sebastian Sprenger in Washington contributed to this report.
Vivienne Machi is a reporter based in Stuttgart, Germany, contributing to Defense News' European coverage. She previously reported for National Defense Magazine, Defense Daily, Via Satellite, Foreign Policy and the Dayton Daily News. She was named the Defence Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2020.
9. Leaked documents suggest plans for Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands
A concern to Australia but also to the US and the region.
I suppose this is why we need to get Ambassador Yun to work on negotiating amendments provisions of the Compacts of Free Association. The Free Association of States is the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau.
From State:
The Compacts reflect the close relationships between the United States and the FAS and are a critical source of regional security, stability, and prosperity. Through these negotiations, we will strengthen our enduring partnerships with our close Pacific Island partners and ensure a free and open and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.
https://www.state.gov/announcing-the-special-presidential-envoy-for-compact-negotiations/
Leaked documents suggest plans for Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands
Australian officials are increasingly worried about China establishing a military presence in Solomon Islands after a leaked document revealed the two countries are negotiating a new security agreement.
Key points:
The documents say Chinese ships may make visits, carry out logistical replacement, and stopover in Solomon Islands
Chinese police officers were recently deployed to the islands to train local authorities
Australian officials are already uneasy about growing security cooperation between the two countries
A draft official document – which emerged on social media earlier today – lays down a framework which could permit Beijing to deploy forces to "protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands".
The agreement says Solomon Islands may "request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces" to the country.
It also states that China's government may "make ship visits, to carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands".
The ABC has verified the document is genuine. It is believed to have been recently drawn up but not yet formally signed by both governments, although the ABC has not yet confirmed this.
It was first published online by an advisor to the Malaita Provincial Government Premier Daniel Suidani, who has been a fierce critic of Solomon Islands' decision to break diplomatic ties with Taiwan and who has been pressing for independence for his province.
Australian officials are already deeply uneasy about growing security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands.
The prospect of a Chinese military presence right on Australia's doorstop, will raise alarm in Canberra.(Reuters: cnsphoto/File)
On Thursday evening, Australia's top diplomat to Solomon Islands, Lachie Strahan, announced the Solomons International Assistance Force would remain in the country until the end of next year, and more monetary aid would be directed to the small nation.
"Following a meeting with PM Sogavare, delighted to confirm Australia will extend the Solomons International Assistance force until December 2023, build a radio network across Solomon Islands, construct a second patrol boat outpost on the eastern border and provide $130 million (SBD) in budget support," the High Commissioner tweeted.
The diplomat did not state whether he had discussed concerns over the draft "Framework Agreement" with China during his meeting with the Prime Minister.
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A contingent of Chinese police officers was recently deployed to Solomon Islands to help train local authorities trying to maintain law and order following last year's deadly anti-government riots.
However, the prospect of a possible Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands, right on Australia's doorstop, will raise far deeper alarm in Canberra.
Australia has long been the main security provider to Solomon Islands and is determined to retain its pre-eminence in that role.
In November, the federal government deployed federal police and ADF personnel to Honiara to restore calm following a request for support from Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
Australia is determined not to lose its place as the main security provider to Solomon Islands.(Reuters: Leigh Vogel/File photo)
Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said the Australian government would view any expansion of Chinese military activity in the Pacific as concerning.
"We will continue to support the Solomon Islands. We know the difficult circumstances that they are in," Ms Andrews said.
"That is our backyard. This is our neighbourhood and we are very concerned of any activity that is taking place in the Pacific Islands.
"Our Pacific Island friends know that we are there to support them."
Solomon Islands Opposition MP Peter Kenilorea Jr has told the ABC he had heard late last year that a security agreement with China was being discussed.
"For me, the writing has been on the wall since the switch [from Taiwan] in 2019," Mr Kenilorea told the ABC.
"Like many Solomon Islanders, I am deeply concerned with these developments on our shores. This has serious security implications for the Pacific Islands region, including Australia."
The head of the National Security College in Canberra, Rory Medcalf, said the document was deeply troubling for Australia.
"This is news of serious security concern to Australia, New Zealand and our Pacific friends — an open door from Honiara for Chinese armed forces to operate in Solomon Islands," Professor Medcalf said.
"Since 2018, sceptical observers have been looking for public proof of China's alleged intent to establish a military presence in the South Pacific, an alarm first raised by Australian security agencies.
"This could begin to fill that gap."
Anna Powles from Massey University said the agreement was "ambiguous, ambitious, and, if it comes into force, has significant and concerning implications for Solomon Islands, Australia, and the region."
"The agreement is notably vague on critical issues such as the type of security personnel that could be deployed to Solomon Islands and the kind of tasks they could be performing," Dr Powles said.
"The agreement also suggests that China is seeking logistical supply capabilities and material assets located in Solomon Islands to support ship visits.
"The conclusion that can be drawn here is that China may seek some kind of basing arrangement in Solomon Islands."
10. White House to Seek $813.3 Billion National Security Budget
A national security budget:
The full national security budget includes spending for the Defense Department, the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons and the FBI’s national security functions. The officials familiar with the budget plan asked not to be identified before its release.
White House to Seek $813.3 Billion National Security Budget
- Fiscal 2023 plan includes $773 billion for Pentagon spending
- It’s $43 billion more than budget office projected last year
March 23, 2022, 7:40 PM EDT
President Joe Biden plans to request $813.3 billion in national security spending -- including $773 billion for the Pentagon -- in the federal budget he will send to Congress on Monday, according to officials familiar with the plan.
It’s an increase of $31 billion, or 4%, from approved spending for the current fiscal year and about $43 billion more than the White House budget office had projected a year ago for fiscal 2023.
The full national security budget includes spending for the Defense Department, the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons and the FBI’s national security functions. The officials familiar with the budget plan asked not to be identified before its release.
The budget reflects the increasing military challenge from China and the development of costly new defense systems -- from upgrading the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal to development of new hypersonic weapons. It was completed with an expectation that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine and some defense spending was shifted accordingly. Support in Congress is likely to be buoyed by the added challenge of confronting Russia.
The request will include $130.1 billion for research and development --the Pentagon’s largest-ever request in that category -- that will be steered to categories such as accelerated research into hypersonics and artificial intelligence. That’s about $15.6 billion more than the budget office had projected last year.
A White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss the spending plan, said it marked one of the biggest national security investments in American history that would strengthen U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific and provide assistance to Ukraine.
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The budget request will also call for as much as $548 million in improvements to the nuclear submarine industrial base.
The national security request typically constitutes about half of the entire discretionary federal budget that’s approved by Congress. The White House has yet to release either its National Security Strategy or the Pentagon-generated National Defense Strategy that are supposed to outline the strategic rationale for the spending.
Biden signed into law $782 billion for national defense activities in the current year, a $32.5 billion increase over fiscal 2021 levels. Out of that the Pentagon’s discretionary spending slice is $728.5 billion.
There’s continued willingness both among Republicans and some key Democrats to increase defense spending. Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services panels -- led by Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama and Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma--have been pressing Biden to request a national security budget for 2023 that would account for inflation plus an additional 5% over the $782 billion enacted for this year.
Inflation most immediately eats into fuel and military pay and benefits, and less immediately into weapons procurement contracts.
“While the higher number for defense this year over last year’s projections recognizes the problem of inflation, it still creates a problem for the Hill in that it is not enough,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute. “If the president’s defense budget for 2023 fails to keep pace with inflation and does not even grow at the levels seen in the recently passed omnibus spending bill for 2022,” Congress will insist on larger increases, she said in an email.
11. Multidomain operations concept will become doctrine this summer
Excerpts:
In the final doctrine set for release in a few months, the Army defines multidomain operations as “the combined arms employment of capabilities from all domains that create and exploit relative advantages to defeat enemy forces, achieve objectives and consolidate gains during competition, crisis, and armed conflict,” according to a document obtained by Defense News at Fort Leavenworth.
“The description of MDO is pretty simple,” Creed said in a March 21 briefing at the Combined Arms Center with Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. “And that’s the point. We wanted it to be that simple, because a lot of this stuff we’ve been doing in fits and starts for a long period of time.”
...
While the concept will be solidified in doctrine, it does not mean it will be set in stone, Creed noted. The doctrine will likely need updating, but is meant to help the service move into a force capable of overmatching its high-end, near-peer adversaries.
Multidomain operations concept will become doctrine this summer
The doctrine will address great power competition and potential conflict with near-peer adversaries across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace.
The second MDTF was established in Europe last fall. The first is based out of Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington State and is focused on INDOPACOM.
In the final doctrine set for release in a few months, the Army defines multidomain operations as “the combined arms employment of capabilities from all domains that create and exploit relative advantages to defeat enemy forces, achieve objectives and consolidate gains during competition, crisis, and armed conflict,” according to a document obtained by Defense News at Fort Leavenworth.
“The description of MDO is pretty simple,” Creed said in a March 21 briefing at the Combined Arms Center with Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. “And that’s the point. We wanted it to be that simple, because a lot of this stuff we’ve been doing in fits and starts for a long period of time.”
Readying for multidomain operations
The doctrine acknowledges the operational environment includes not just air, land and sea but also space and cyberspace and that Army forces operate “through the physical dimension, influence through the information dimension and achieve victory (win) in the human dimension,” the document notes.
Army formations will be designed to exploit “relative advantage” in those three dimensions, it adds.
The doctrine concludes that winning against a peer threat like Russia or China requires Army forces to “fracture the coherence of threat operational approaches by breaking up their interdependent systems and formations and then rapidly exploiting opportunities to defeat enemy forces in detail,” according to the document.
Multidomain operations is conducted during three phases of operation: competition, crisis and armed conflict. It addresses the challenge of peer competitors using layered capabilities at stand-off range to deter, requiring the U.S. and its partners and allies to use redundant land-based capabilities to take out or degrade threat networked intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and long-range fires capabilities, the document details.
China and Russia are positioned to “win without fighting” when it can control the narrative and facts on the ground, so the Army must establish a truthful narrative to contest that approach during both competition and crisis phases of operation, the document says.
The doctrine will require the Army to understand how forces on land influence the other four domains and how capabilities used in other domains influence outcomes on the ground. The strategy also requires “a mission command approach” to command-and-control to reduce the risk from degraded networks and a heavily contested electromagnetic spectrum.
The final doctrine will include seven chapters. The first addresses foundations of operations including the vision of war, the operational environment and Army formations.
The second covers fundamentals of multidomain operations, including tenets, imperatives, operational framework and operational approach, while chapters three through five are on operations during competition, operations during crisis and operations during armed conflict and war, respectively.
Not present in previous versions of the concept and new to the doctrine is the sixth chapter, on Army operations in maritime-dominated environments.
“This represents a capstone doctoral shift to account for the Pacific pivot,” Creed said, although it will be applicable anywhere there is water. “There are some very different considerations in terms of planning, conduct and expectations for the operation,” he added.
The last chapter focuses on leadership during operations, emphasizing the mission command approach.
Looking to ‘playbooks’
The doctrine is general enough to apply to a variety of theaters and situations, but, according to Brig. Gen. Charles Lombardo, who commands the Army’s CAC-Training, the Army is working to develop “playbooks” for operations against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China that take a “pretty granular approach.”
These playbooks break down, at a systems level, the threat and what would be needed to operate against those threat capabilities, Lombardo said.
During operations in competition, the doctrine says the Army should preserve a desired security environment, develop and refine operational planning and improve itself and partners. The Army should also set conditions in the theater for future operations to include access, intelligence, plans, training and interoperability.
During a crisis, the Army should deny adversary goals, deter further adversary military action, alter the adversary’s risk calculus and provide flexible deterrent and response options. The service should deploy and tailor Army forces, demonstrate the capacity of multiple aerial ports of debarkation and seaports of debarkation and open up lines of communication.
Lastly, during a conflict or war, the Army needs to understand the enemy operational approach and goals, present multiple dilemmas and converge capability across the joint force and isolate and destroy enemy capabilities and maneuver to dislocate and disintegrate the enemy’s position and enable the entire joint force to operate in addition to land forces. This means accepting some risk, the document notes.
While the concept will be solidified in doctrine, it does not mean it will be set in stone, Creed noted. The doctrine will likely need updating, but is meant to help the service move into a force capable of overmatching its high-end, near-peer adversaries.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts from Kenyon College.
12. How Russia's warfare doctrine is failing in Ukraine
The different views of airpower between Russia and the US.
How Russia's warfare doctrine is failing in Ukraine
Now more than a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the embattled nation’s defensive forces have seemingly made the impossible commonplace, halting Russian ground forces on multiple fronts and somehow managing to keep the nation’s airspace contested despite Russia’s overwhelming numbers.
Russia’s Air Force, considered the second largest in the world behind only the United States, operates very differently than the American airpower we’ve all come to know over the past decades of combat operations in the Middle East. While Russia’s military is certainly suffering from a symphony of problems that have been discussed by many over the past four weeks, some of its most significant issues may not be errors at all. To some extent, it’s Russia’s very approach to warfare that’s failing in the skies over Ukraine.
American Airpower: Dominate the skies to win the war
(U.S. Air Force photo)
In the United States, combat operations are divided into six notional phases, each of which sees participation from large portions of the force working together toward intermediate objectives. It provides a basic rubric for commanders and their staff to visualize and plan for large combat operations with an eye toward their requirements. Until 2009, U.S. doctrine was broken down into four phases, but dramatic changes were incorporated leveraging lessons learned during the Global War on Terror.
The six phases of war are shaping, deterring, seizing the initiative, dominating, stabilizing, enabling civilian authority, and then a return to shaping.
This phased approach allows commanders to ensure their forces have adequate personnel, resources, equipment, and time to complete each intermediate objective before moving on to the next phase of operations. As Dr. Rebecca Grant, president of IRIS Independent Research, pointed out in Air Force Magazine some 13 years ago, airpower plays a role in every phase of American combat doctrine, and further, it’s critical for the most important of them.
Airpower in the form of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) as well as armed patrols are vital to deterrence. U.S. aircraft also often play a pivotal role in seizing the initiative, conducting airstrikes, and providing ISR. In the domination phase, American jets take control of the airspace, eliminating or mitigating both enemy aircraft and air defenses, before providing close air support and ISR for ground forces. In the stabilize and enabling civil authorities phases, airpower is once again relied on for everything from reconnaissance to providing armed support to help legitimize the new sitting government.
(U.S. Air Force photo)
Importantly, massive, overwhelming airpower is vital to both the seizing the initiative and domination phases of American warfare doctrine, where aircraft would be used to quickly neutralize any threat the enemy could pose in the air so subsequent airstrikes and support of ground troops can both be conducted with little risk to allied aircraft.
In a very real way, one could make an informed argument that the United States’ approach to warfare is built around its airpower capabilities, with ground forces being used in conjunction with aircraft and long-range weapon systems to achieve overarching goals. That’s not to downplay the incredible importance of ground forces in combat, but rather to highlight just how important securing air dominance is to the American way of fighting.
Russia doesn’t use airpower the same way
Russian Su-27s (WikiMedia Commons)
Russia’s modern military doctrine takes a very different approach to warfare, placing a much larger emphasis on what Russia calls new generation warfare (NGW) in the lead-up and early stages of conflict (Grey Zone operations), and then the measured and even budget-minded use of force during the conflict itself. Russia uses its more expensive assets only as necessary, and where cheaper alternatives don’t seem viable—a stark contrast to America’s approach to overwhelming technological might.
Importantly, Russia’s military doctrine is not built on the back of airpower like one might say America’s is, but rather sees airpower as subservient to its larger ground forces. As Forbes writer David Axe put it, Russia’s air force is primarily used as airborne artillery. This may, in fact, be the direct result of NATO’s massive airpower capabilities, and the Russian understanding that it may lose air superiority in the event of a large-scale conflict. Rather than trying to win a losing battle, Russian doctrine has shifted to accept the idea that it may not control the airspace it’s fighting in.
“Rather than seeking to dominate a battlespace, Russia prioritizes flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing conditions in a conflict.”
“Russian Armed Forces: Military Doctrine and Strategy,” Congressional Research Service, March 20, 2020
(Russian Ministry of Defence)
Russia’s military doctrine does not call for using its airpower apparatus to quickly take total control over enemy airspace, nor does it even call for the rapid elimination of enemy air defenses. This speaks to Russia’s lack of dedicated suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) platforms like America’s specialized Wild Weasel F-16s. Russian jets can and do employ anti-radiation missiles to engage air defense systems, for instance, but it’s not a job that any Russian pilot or aircraft specializes in or frequently trains specifically for.
Instead, Russia places a heavy emphasis on long-range fires, with the use of their own integrated air defense systems even prioritized over tasking aircraft with dominating the airspace above their forces.
Russia’s approach to warfare calls for using advanced air defense systems to mitigate the effectiveness of enemy air defenses and aircraft alike, all while using a high volume of artillery, rocket, and missile fire to gain and leverage fire superiority. Aircraft support ground forces to these ends, rather than serving as the primary means of taking control over the battlespace. If airpower serves as the backbone of America’s military doctrine, large tank units and artillery serve as the backbone of Russia’s.
“Russian views are consistent: They believe the advantage in modern warfare goes to the side that can gain and sustain fire superiority over the adversary, and in some scenarios they would likely feel compelled to attack to secure that advantage.”
“The Russian Way of Warfare” by Scott Boston and Dara Massicot, Rand Corporation
Russia does not prioritize denying airspace to its enemies
Russian S-400 air defense system (WikiMedia Commons)
Russia’s approach to warfare calls for very literally punishing their enemies in the initial stages of fighting with the goal of rapidly resolving conflicts in a way Russia deems favorable. As the Congressional Research Service points out, Russia’s goal is not to deny an adversary area access.
“Rather, Russian doctrine focuses on integrated defenses (especially aerospace defense forces) that treat the enemy as a system. It seeks to disrupt, deflect, and eventually punish an attacker in the initial stages of a conflict.”
“Russian Armed Forces: Military Doctrine and Strategy,” Congressional Research Service, March 20, 2020
Russia aims to use its fire superiority to target and degrade critical elements of command and infrastructure that will ultimately force its opponent to agree to favorable terms. As such, the strategy Russian commanders employ seemingly assumes nationwide air dominance won’t be assured. That shouldn’t be mistaken for arguing that Russia won’t use aircraft and integrated air defense systems to dominate their immediate airspace or airspace over an objective to the best of their ability. They would and are certainly doing that. But Russia doesn’t view establishing country-wide air dominance as essential to accomplishing their broader objectives.
Because Russian forces seemingly have difficulty discerning between friendly and enemy aircraft in a chaotic battlefield environment, a heavy presence of Russian aircraft operating over Russian forces likely seems riskier than relying on advanced air defense systems like the S-400 Triumpf to keep enemy aircraft from engaging their troops, however.
So instead, Russian jets are used in a similar fashion to Russian artillery: conducting airstrikes against targets in support of its ground forces.
Russia’s approach is not working in Ukraine
Destroyed Russian tank in Ukraine (WikiMedia Commons)
Russia’s use of airpower as a supplement to its overarching objective to secure fire superiority has proven largely ineffective over Ukraine, as have Russia’s long-touted integrated air defense systems. While Ukraine’s air force has certainly suffered losses, they continue to fly combat sorties every day more than a month into this conflict.
“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” A Ukrainian Su-27 pilot named Andriy told the New York Times. “In every fight with Russian jets, there is no equality. They always have five times more planes in the air.”
Ukrainian fighters, mostly operating at night, have continued to provide air support to ground forces on the defense, and Ukrainian drones have wreaked havoc against Russian equipment throughout the country. Meanwhile, Russian aircraft continue to fly hundreds of sorties per day, often deploying munitions while still inside Russian airspace at targets hundreds of miles inside Ukraine, serving as long-range artillery for their largely stalled ground forces.
Russia’s inability to take control of Ukrainian airspace, coupled with its doctrinal approach to using aircraft as an extension of their long-range artillery and rocket assets, is clearly not working it was meant to on paper.
We’ve already discussed a number of reasons Russia has struggled to capture Ukraine’s skies (you can read them here), but perhaps the most important reason of all may simply be that Russia’s approach to warfare severely undervalued the importance of controlling the airspace overhead. However the war in Ukraine eventually concludes, it seems likely that we’ll see a shift in Russia’s concept of airpower and its uses in warfare in the years to come.
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13. The Money Question: How Long Can Russia Wage War Against Ukraine?
Cannot fight a war without money. (for very long), but...
Excerpts:
The short answer is that Russia can keep fighting for a very long time, because it can cover most of its needs from its own defense industrial base and because it can still export energy to a few key partners. This is quite different from saying that Russia’s economy won’t suffer from the war; military production displaces civilian production, workers tend to work harder for a currency that’s worth something, and the inflation that will likely result from a wartime economy will almost undoubtedly generate social unrest. But Russia can manage its own money supply and its domestic financial system through tools that Moscow possesses and that Washington cannot readily interfere with. The Russian government’s ability to print money means that the domestic economy will continue to function in some fashion, notwithstanding the impact of the sanctions. Iran, for example, has managed very moderate growth despite an almost complete cut-off from the global financial system.
Still, the prospect of a long war means nothing at all positive for the Russian economy. War diverts young, productive workers from economically useful tasks to soldiering, which often involves dying or suffering permanently disabling injuries. The need to feed the war machine will distort Russia’s economy by shifting production away from economically viable industries. Hyperinflation may result from the printing of too much money to chase too few consumer goods. If the war ended tomorrow it would take Russia years to undo the damage to its economy, and there is no indication that the war will end tomorrow.
The Money Question: How Long Can Russia Wage War Against Ukraine?
How long can Russia afford to fight? The campaign of economic sanctions that have fallen upon the Russian economy was designed first as a deterrent, now as a punishment. It will have the effect of severely damaging Russian economic growth, cutting Russia off from some critical technology flows, and limiting the extent to which Russians can do business abroad. It may not, however, stop the Russians from continuing their war in Ukraine.
Russia Is In Sanctions Hell
The sanctions have left Russia in a dreadful position. Many of its foreign reserves of currency have been frozen, ruining years of accumulation and preparation. In short order, Russia may default on its sovereign debt. This represents almost as much of a threat to the international financial order as it does to Russia, although Russia will certainly suffer long-term consequences.
Russia is also struggling to complete contracts for energy because of nervousness in freight and energy shipping companies. And countries at war do sometimes simply run out of money. In World War I the Entente came perilously close to insolvency, finally rescued only by the largesse of the Wilson administration. In the Russo-Japanese War, Japan traded away many of its gains on the battlefield because its sources of funding (London and New York) had largely dried up. Russia isn’t quite in this dire of a position.
However, Russia is not bankrupt in the sense that it has no financial assets. It has substantial reserves of hard currency and gold including some $300 billion in foreign currency and gold reserves held domestically or in friendly countries. Its export economy is primarily based on energy, making it possible to earn hard currency (especially as Europe continues to buy Russian gas), arrange barter agreements, and conduct business in non-dollar denominated currencies. Its armed forces depend largely on its own defense industrial base, meaning that it can pay for equipment with its own currency. It can strike deals with the only country that matters as far as military support, the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, Russia appears to have prepared for some time for the possibility that it might be cut off from the global financial system.
Above and beyond the sanctions, the war will take an economic toll. Russia reportedly expected the conflict to last only a few days, and thus to have a limited economic impact. Even had that plan worked out, the costs of the mobilization and the long-term deployment of forces along Ukraine’s border would have strained the Russian defense budget.
But the situation has turned out much worse than the Russians could have anticipated. Russian forces remain engaged in the field and have failed to inflict a decisive defeat on the Ukrainian army. Russia is running through pre-war stocks of munitions, food, and vehicles at an alarming and very possibly unsustainable rate. Estimates of the monetary cost of the fight range from $500 million per day to some $20 billion. The accuracy of these claims depends on what you count as a cost; including the full price of the equipment destroyed gets you closer to the high estimate but does not necessarily reflect the immediate burden on the Russian economy.
The short answer is that Russia can keep fighting for a very long time, because it can cover most of its needs from its own defense industrial base and because it can still export energy to a few key partners. This is quite different from saying that Russia’s economy won’t suffer from the war; military production displaces civilian production, workers tend to work harder for a currency that’s worth something, and the inflation that will likely result from a wartime economy will almost undoubtedly generate social unrest. But Russia can manage its own money supply and its domestic financial system through tools that Moscow possesses and that Washington cannot readily interfere with. The Russian government’s ability to print money means that the domestic economy will continue to function in some fashion, notwithstanding the impact of the sanctions. Iran, for example, has managed very moderate growth despite an almost complete cut-off from the global financial system.
Still, the prospect of a long war means nothing at all positive for the Russian economy. War diverts young, productive workers from economically useful tasks to soldiering, which often involves dying or suffering permanently disabling injuries. The need to feed the war machine will distort Russia’s economy by shifting production away from economically viable industries. Hyperinflation may result from the printing of too much money to chase too few consumer goods. If the war ended tomorrow it would take Russia years to undo the damage to its economy, and there is no indication that the war will end tomorrow.
14. Our Elites Need to Recognize that America’s ‘Unipolar Moment’ is Over
Excerpts:
But more fundamentally, there are far too many members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who act as if the U.S. unipolar moment never ended; who act as if we can dictate the outcome or impose our will on international events and other nations’ policies; and who refuse to accept that we live and operate in a multi-polar world similar to the 19th century when prudent statesmen sought peace, stability, and a balance of power instead of promoting democratic ideals.
Krauthammer recognized that the unipolar moment would not last forever--that is why he used the term "moment." In fact, it is questionable if it ever really existed. Yes, for a brief few years, we were the sole superpower in the world. But even superpowers have limits--just think of Afghanistan and Iraq, or before that, Vietnam and Korea.
In U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Walter Lippmann famously wrote that the United States needed to keep its international commitments consistent with the limits of its resources. When we don't do that, it creates a gap between commitments and resources that some later called the “Lippmann Gap.” After George Kennan proposed the containment doctrine in his “X” article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, Lippmann responded with a series of columns that were later collected in a book entitled The Cold War. Lippmann criticized Kennan's version of containment because it required the United States to react to Soviet aggression everywhere instead of only those geographical regions that were vital to America's security interests. (Kennan later said that Lippmann's criticism was well taken). Lippmann understood the limits of American power. So did Jeane Kirkpatrick. Ann Pierce and many others do not.
Our Elites Need to Recognize that America’s ‘Unipolar Moment’ is Over
Writing in the current Washington Examiner, Anne Pierce suggests that the United States is today confronted by a new “Avis of Evil” composed of Russia, China, and Iran, which poses an existential threat to U.S. security. Pierce contends that American policymakers mistakenly pivoted to Asia when their focus should have been Russia and Europe. She calls on the Biden administration to wage economic warfare against Russia while providing Ukraine with whatever military material its leaders request, and to catalog Russian atrocities “with the aim of prosecuting Russia for war crimes.” To refuse to do this, she writes, would be a “moral, strategic, and military failure of historic proportions.”
One could be forgiven for thinking that Pierce, who is the author of A Perilous Path: The Misguided Foreign Policy of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, believes that we are still operating in America's "unipolar moment." Her article suggests that the United States could and should confront Russia, China and Iran simultaneously and that Russia currently poses the greatest threat to our security. And while she is right to call Russia, China, and Iran an Axis of Evil, her article exhibits no sense of the limits of America’s power; no recognition that perhaps our resources would be spread too thin by failing to prioritize threats among these three adversaries; no realization that America’s unipolar moment is over.
At the end of the Cold War in 1991, columnist Charles Krauthammer writing in Foreign Affairs, declared that the United States was the unchallenged superpower and was enjoying a "unipolar moment." Francis Fukuyama (channeling Hegel) envisioned the "end of history" where democracy would be universal. Others predicted that there would be no more "great power wars." And the George H.W. Bush administration in its defense planning guidance in 1992 (largely written by Paul Wolfowitz) suggested that the primary goal of U.S. national security policy was "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," meaning "to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power." How we were to accomplish that was not fully explained.
It was a time of celebration--the 45-year Cold War was over. The West, led by the United States, had won. The Soviet empire collapsed. China, our de facto ally at the end of the Cold War, appeared to be foregoing communist ideology in favor of economic growth produced by a relaxation of state control over the economy. There was an element of hubris involved in proclaiming the end of a multi-polar world or suggesting that history had ended. Victory sometimes breeds hubris. And hubris can be dangerous.
After the attacks by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, America’s hubris manifested itself in an effort to spread democracy to the world, but in the first instances to Afghanistan and Iraq. That resulted in two long wars that sapped America’s treasure and spilled the blood of American soldiers in a futile attempt to install democratic governments in regions where the soil for planting democracy was at best thin and at worst non-existent. The George W. Bush administration rightly responded to attacks on our country by hunting down the terrorists responsible and retaliating against some of the regimes that supported the terrorists. But then it got carried away and launched a Wilsonian crusade for democracy.
Meanwhile, the unipolar moment was ending, and the two long wars against non-peer competitors distracted us from the rise of China, which was growing economically and militarily--with the help of Wall Street and other Westerners who reaped economic benefits from "engagement" with the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, our hubris blinded us to an essential truth about the victory in the Cold War--it was achieved by exploiting the division between Soviet Russia and China (just as our parochial history sometimes blinds us to the fact that our victory in World War II was achieved by exploiting the division between Germany and Soviet Russia). So we hardly paid any attention when Sino-Russian rapprochement transformed into a Chinese-Russian strategic alignment against the U.S.-led world order.
As President Reagan's U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War. But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world. She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation's vital national security interests. Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world. She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be "the special province" of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences. Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop "disinterested globalist" attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as "internationalism" instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.
This did not mean that the United States shouldn’t encourage the growth of democratic institutions where prudently possible, but Kirkpatrick expressly warned that “it is not within the United States’ power to democratize the world.” Instead, the United States, she wrote, should be a normal country--“an independent nation in a world of independent nations.”
The Obama administration pursued, and the Biden administration continues to pursue, a globalist agenda that prioritizes multilateral efforts against climate change; promotes nuclear disarmament; and seeks to transform our armed forces into a “woke” military concerned more with race, gender, and “white nationalism” than being prepared and equipped to win wars. The Biden administration is staffed (as Obama’s was) with elites who appear to be committed to a “disinterested globalist” or “internationalist” agenda. They seem to believe that they are as much “citizens of the world” as they are citizens of the United States.
But more fundamentally, there are far too many members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who act as if the U.S. unipolar moment never ended; who act as if we can dictate the outcome or impose our will on international events and other nations’ policies; and who refuse to accept that we live and operate in a multi-polar world similar to the 19th century when prudent statesmen sought peace, stability, and a balance of power instead of promoting democratic ideals.
Krauthammer recognized that the unipolar moment would not last forever--that is why he used the term "moment." In fact, it is questionable if it ever really existed. Yes, for a brief few years, we were the sole superpower in the world. But even superpowers have limits--just think of Afghanistan and Iraq, or before that, Vietnam and Korea.
In U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, Walter Lippmann famously wrote that the United States needed to keep its international commitments consistent with the limits of its resources. When we don't do that, it creates a gap between commitments and resources that some later called the “Lippmann Gap.” After George Kennan proposed the containment doctrine in his “X” article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, Lippmann responded with a series of columns that were later collected in a book entitled The Cold War. Lippmann criticized Kennan's version of containment because it required the United States to react to Soviet aggression everywhere instead of only those geographical regions that were vital to America's security interests. (Kennan later said that Lippmann's criticism was well taken). Lippmann understood the limits of American power. So did Jeane Kirkpatrick. Ann Pierce and many others do not.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.
15. U.S. Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons
I would be surprised and disappointed if the administration was not doing this. With all due respect to the journalists, establishing a tiger team is not a scoop or something unusual. There are various names for the groups conducting such contingency planning. I would say the administration established a tiger team to conduct contingency planning. I would not call it The Tiger Team.
Excerpts:
The Tiger Team, as the group is known, is also examining responses if Mr. Putin reaches into NATO territory to attack convoys bringing weapons and aid to Ukraine, according to several officials involved in the process. Meeting three times a week, in classified sessions, the team is also looking at responses if Russia seeks to extend the war to neighboring nations, including Moldova and Georgia, and how to prepare European countries for the refugees flowing in on a scale not seen in decades.
Those contingencies are expected to be central to an extraordinary session here in Brussels on Thursday, when President Biden meets leaders of the 29 other NATO nations, who will be meeting for the first time — behind closed doors, their cellphones and aides banished — since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine.
U.S. Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons
March 23, 2022, 7:36 p.m. ET
President Biden arrived in Brussels on Wednesday, where he will meet with NATO leaders.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
BRUSSELS — The White House has quietly assembled a team of national security officials to sketch out scenarios of how the United States and its allies should respond if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — frustrated by his lack of progress in Ukraine or determined to warn Western nations against intervening in the war — unleashes his stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The Tiger Team, as the group is known, is also examining responses if Mr. Putin reaches into NATO territory to attack convoys bringing weapons and aid to Ukraine, according to several officials involved in the process. Meeting three times a week, in classified sessions, the team is also looking at responses if Russia seeks to extend the war to neighboring nations, including Moldova and Georgia, and how to prepare European countries for the refugees flowing in on a scale not seen in decades.
Those contingencies are expected to be central to an extraordinary session here in Brussels on Thursday, when President Biden meets leaders of the 29 other NATO nations, who will be meeting for the first time — behind closed doors, their cellphones and aides banished — since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine.
Just a month ago, such scenarios seemed more theoretical. But today, from the White House to NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, a recognition has set in that Russia may turn to the most powerful weapons in its arsenal to bail itself out of a military stalemate.
NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, underscored the urgency of the preparation effort on Wednesday, telling reporters for the first time that even if the Russians employ weapons of mass destruction only inside Ukraine, they may have “dire consequences” for people in NATO nations. He appeared to be discussing the fear that chemical or radioactive clouds could drift over the border. One issue under examination is whether such collateral damage would be considered an “attack” on NATO under its charter, which might require a joint military response.
The current team was established in a memo signed by Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, on Feb. 28, four days after the invasion began, according to the officials involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning. A previous iteration had worked for months, behind the scenes, to prepare the U.S. government for the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That team played a central role in devising the playbooks of deep sanctions, troop buildups in NATO nations and arming the Ukrainian military, which have exploited Russian weaknesses and put its government and economy under tremendous pressure.
Mr. Stoltenberg, sounding far more hawkish than in the past, said he expected “allies will agree to provide additional support, including cybersecurity assistance and equipment to help Ukraine protect against chemical, biological, radiologic and nuclear threats.”
As Mr. Biden flew to Europe on Wednesday, both he and Mr. Stoltenberg warned of growing evidence that Russia was in fact preparing to use chemical weapons in Ukraine.
These are questions that Europe has not confronted since the depths of the Cold War, when NATO had far fewer members, and Western Europe worried about a Soviet attack headed into Germany. But few of the leaders set to meet in Brussels on Thursday ever had to deal with those scenarios — and many have never had to think about nuclear deterrence or the effects of the detonation of battlefield nuclear weapons, designed to be less powerful than those that destroyed Hiroshima. The fear is that Russia is more likely to use those weapons, precisely because they erode the distinction between conventional and nuclear arms.
Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, said on Wednesday that if Mr. Putin used a weapon of mass destruction — chemical, biological or nuclear — “there would be consequences” even if the weapon’s use was confined to Ukraine. Mr. Reed said radiation from a nuclear weapon, for instance, could waft into a neighboring NATO country and be considered an attack on a NATO member.
“It’s going to be a very difficult call, but it’s a call that not just the president but the entire NATO Council will have to make,” Mr. Reed told reporters, referring to the governing body of the Western alliance.
“The bottom line is this is a NATO decision,” Mr. Reed said. “It won’t be the president’s decision alone. I don’t think he’d want to take action unilaterally.”
One major issue the Tiger Team is looking at is the threshold that could prompt the alliance to use military force in Ukraine. Mr. Biden has made clear that he is enormously reluctant to to do so, fearing that direct confrontation with Russia could escalate the conflict beyond control. “That’s World War III,” he noted recently.
A second team of officials, also created by Mr. Sullivan’s Feb. 28 memo, is looking at long-term opportunities for the United States to improve its geopolitical position as a result of Mr. Putin’s invasion. Inside the White House, it has become an article of faith that the Russian leader made a huge strategic error — one that will diminish Russia’s standing, cripple its economy and alienate potential allies for years. But it is early in the conflict, other officials caution, and that conclusion may prove premature.
The remains of the Retroville Mall after a powerful explosion in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Monday.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
The immediate concern is what Mr. Putin may do next — driven by a desire to rescue a failing military effort or re-establish his credentials as a force to be feared.
Officials believe the chances that Mr. Putin will resort to detonating a nuclear weapon are small. But Russia’s steady stream of reminders that it has its arsenal at the ready, and could use it in response to anything it perceives as an “existential threat,” has put Washington on high alert.
Mr. Biden will take up with allies “how to deal with the rhetoric and the commentary coming out of Russia on this whole question of the potential use of nuclear weapons,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters on Wednesday.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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“We haven’t seen anything that’s made us adjust our posture, our nuclear posture, but it is of course something we will have to continue to stay in close consultation with allies and partners on, as well as communicate directly to the Russians.”
Several officials said the White House and Pentagon have had some tension over how much detail the Defense Department is willing to share on its highly secretive war planning — especially concerning responses to any use of nuclear weapons — even in the classified setting of the Tiger Team. (The term has been used for many years to describe an emergency task force inside the National Security Council.)
A U.S. official said Mr. Biden remained adamant about keeping American forces out of Ukraine. But the official said the administration believed it would be misguided not to closely examine the thresholds, if any, under which the president would reverse himself, or to be prepared to deal with the consequences of the use of weapons of mass destruction.
A senior administration official said any use of a “small” tactical nuclear bomb by Russia — even inside Ukraine and not directed at a NATO member — would mean that “all bets are off” on the United States and NATO staying out of the war. But when pushed, the official declined to lay out the responses under discussion.
The official said American and NATO intelligence communities had not seen any activity by Russian military officials that suggested preparations to use a nuclear weapon. But he said that during internal discussions, administration officials were urging caution, because there was more at stake than just Ukraine.
U.S. officials’ immediate concern is what President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia may do next, driven by a desire to rescue a failing military effort or re-establish his credentials as a force to be feared.Credit...Sputnik, via Reuters
If Mr. Putin did strike a NATO country intentionally, he would not only bring the force of the military alliance to bear on Russia, but also probably find himself facing NATO troops inside Ukraine, Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister, told reporters traveling in his country this month with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“He will get Article 5,” Mr. Pabriks said, in a reference to the NATO pledge that an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all.
“If he gets that, basically that would also make us involved in Ukraine,” Mr. Pabriks said, adding: “He has no way out of that. So I don’t think he should be so stupid.”
Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent and a member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, visited the Polish-Ukrainian border over the weekend, meeting with officials from allied countries, visiting a refugee processing center and talking with Ukrainians. Mr. King said that as Russian forces struggle to make headway, Mr. Putin could try to strike a diplomatic agreement, intensify his bombardment of Ukrainian cities and level them, or lash out against the West with a cyberattack.
“The fourth is escalate to de-escalate, which is a tactical nuclear weapon,” Mr. King said, using the term for a Russian military doctrine in which it would employ a nuclear weapon as a warning — and then negotiate.
David E. Sanger reported from Brussels, and Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Julian Barnes from Washington.
16. Ukraine War Update - March 24, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine War Update - March 24, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO. Additional topics include refugees, internally displaced personnel, humanitarian efforts, cyber, and information operations.
Photo: Ukraine SOF teams competed in the Annual UKRSOF Tournament 2020. Photo depicts SOTU members fast roping from helicopter. Photo by Ukrainian SOFCOM PAO.
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Battlefield Update. The Russians may have pulled back a bit from their positions east of Kyiv. A counterattack by the Ukrainians west of Kyiv have prevented the Russians from moving south and encircling the capital city. There are indications that Russian forces are employing more defensive tactics – digging in and emplacing mines. The battlefield is relatively static at the moment. In eastern Ukraine Russian forces are trying to envelop the Ukrainian forces – advancing from Kharkiv in the north and Mariupol in the south. This would cut off Ukrainian forces in the east from their resupply routes. Russian forces may try to skirt around the city of Mykolaiv in an attempt to push towards Odessa.
Russian combat power is about 90% of the pre-invasion force that was arrayed on Ukrainian borders. NATO estimates (Wednesday) that Russia has lost between 7,000 to 15,000 in Ukraine. Overall NATO believes that between 30,000 to 40,000 Russians have been killed or wounded. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense says that as of Wednesday (Mar 23) the Russians have suffered over 15,000 KIA. Russian forces are experiencing shortages of cold weather clothing, food, and fuel. The conditions of the Russian soldiers are affecting their morale.
“We certainly have indications that morale is a growing problem inside the Russian forces that are fighting in Ukraine. We’ve seen increasing indications that morale and unit cohesion is a problem and yes, absolutely translates into potential military effectiveness issues.”
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby, March 23, 2022.
Maritime Activities. An amphibious landing force on several ships is still positioned in the Black Sea off the coast of Odessa to land a substantial element of Russian naval infantry. The Russian blockade of Ukrainian shipping continues.
Kyiv. Two million people remain in Kyiv. The supply lines are still open. The capital city of Ukraine is considered the primary objective of the Russians. The Capture of Kyiv would allow Russia to put in place its puppet government.
Lviv. The western Ukraine city of Lviv has been relatively untouched by the ground war taking place in eastern Ukraine. However, its citizens are preparing for a fight should it come to them. View a photo gallery of Lviv residents training for combat. (The Washington Post, Mar 23, 2022).
Mariupol. Almost 3,000 people were evacuated from the city on Wednesday (Mar 23). Located on the Sea of Azov, the coastal city of Mariupol is under siege by the Russians. This city is situated along the coastal road network that would provide Russia with a land bridge between Russia and the Crimea. Some estimates say that 100,000 Ukrainians remain in the city. The fighting is taking place street by street and block by block.
General Information
NATO Meeting on Thursday. The leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are meeting in Brussels today (Mar 24) to discuss the Ukrainian War. The conference will be chaired by the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. President Zelensky is expected to address the NATO leaders. NATO has decided to increase its military presence in the eastern part of the Alliance. Four new battlegroups will be established to be based in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. This will bring the total number of NATO battlegroups in eastern Europe to eight. NATO has repeated its position that it will not send NATO troops into Ukraine nor fly aircraft in its airspace.
NATO and No-Fly Zone. NATO’s Secretary General has repeated the NATO position on a no-fly zone on Thursday (Mar 24):
“And to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine means that we need to impose it, and to impose a no-fly zone means that we need to massively attack Russian air defence systems in Russia, in Belarus and in Ukraine, and also be ready to shoot down Russian planes. And then the risk for a full-fledged war between NATO and Russia will be very high, and that will cause more deaths and more destruction.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, March 24, 2022
Refugees, IDPs, and Humanitarian Crisis. As of March 23, over 3,400,000 refugees have left Ukraine according to data provided by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). Almost 5,000 people were evacuated from conflict areas in Ukraine. Seven of the nine humanitarian corridors were used on Wednesday. The United Nations Officer for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has published its Humanitarian Impact Situation Report for March 23, 2022.
Poland and Ukrainian Refugees. Poland has received the vast majority of the Ukrainians who have fled Ukraine. The nation has accepted more than 2 million refugees. No one can predict how long the Ukrainian refugees will be in Poland; perhaps many will never return to their home country. Once the refugees have been established in homes, the children will need to begin school and the adults will need to find work. Matching refugees to available jobs will be a challenge. See “For Ukrainian Refugees in Poland, Livelihood Needs Will Follow Humanitarian Ones”, RAND Corporation, March 18, 2022.
War Crimes. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused Russia of committing war crimes. Read more in a U.S. Department of State press statement released on March 23, 2022 entitled “War Crimes by Russia’s Forces in Ukraine”.
Russia’s Nuclear Weapons. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has published a 46 page report (PDF) entitled Russia’s Nuclear Weapons: Doctrine, Forces, and Modernization. The report covers Russian doctrine and deployment, arms control agreements, recent developments, modernization programs, and more. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45861
Sweden Sending Weapons. The Swedish defense minister said that his country will be sending additional anti-tank equipment to Ukraine. Sweden has already sent thousands of anti-tank weapons.
Cyber and Information Operations
Cyber Attack on Railways. Ukrzaliznytsia says that its accounts were hacked. The state railway operator’s press service, online ticketing, and telephone services were temporarily unavailable. The passenger data is safe and the movement of trains continues.
The Will to Fight. Russia underestimated the resistance of the Ukrainians to the invasion. One of the main ingredients to waging war if for the population base to have the ‘will to fight’. Information operations and social media plays a huge role in the aspect of warfare and that is certainly true of the Ukraine War. Read more in “The Will to Fight in the Age of Social Media”, RAND Corporation, March 22, 2022.
“Countries that are eligible for participation can include but are not limited to Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and the South Caucasus region.”
Russian Influence Abroad? The dismal record of the Russian military over the past four weeks has many national security observers perplexed. Also taking note are many of the nations that usually line up in the ‘Russian camp’ and host Russian forces in their countries. Russia’s poor performance thus far in the Ukraine war will likely have a negative impact on the Kremlin’s influence abroad – especially in the Middle East and in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditional Russian partners may reconsider their role as a ‘vassal state’ and could look to alternative guarantors of security. “How Will Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Impact Its Influence Abroad?”, The Soufan Center IntelBrief, March 24, 2022.
Commentary
Russian Military Professionalism. When security experts analyze a country’s military they usually focus on hardware, equipment, airplanes, tanks, and ships. Less time is spent on military training and the professionalism of the military personnel. National security observers may have overestimated the capability of the Russian armed forces by overlooking one key factor – its professionalism. Read more in “Russia’s Problems with Military Professionalism”, RAND Corporation, March 21, 2022.
Missing in Russia’s Military Strategy. A retired Australian general provided his thoughts on what has gone wrong for the invading nation in the Ukraine War. Major General Mick Ryan (Ret.) identified three mission areas in Russia’s military strategy: cyber operations, poor Russian command and control, and a lack of human-machine teaming. “Retired ADF Major General breaks down Russian invasion, identifies missing capabilities”, Defence Connect, March 24, 2022.
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, defense, or the current conflict in Ukraine then we are interested.
Maps and Other Resources
UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one
Maps of Ukraine
Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.
UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation
Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.
Janes Equipment Profile – Ukraine Conflict. An 81-page PDF provides information on the military equipment of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces. Covers naval, air, electronic warfare, C4ISR, communications, night vision, radar, and armored fighting vehicles, Ukraine Conflict Equipment Profile, February 28, 2022.
Arms Transfers to Ukraine. Forum on the Arms Trade.
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17. NATO: Up to 40,000 Russian Troops Killed, Wounded, Taken Prisoner or Missing in Ukraine
That is quite a number. How long can Russia sustain these losses?
NATO: Up to 40,000 Russian Troops Killed, Wounded, Taken Prisoner or Missing in Ukraine
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A Russian tank in Kyiv region, Ukraine.PRESS SERVICE OF THE UKRAINIAN G/via REUTERS
NATO says that up to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, taken prisoner or are missing in Ukraine, said a senior military official from the alliance.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization calculates the figure based on information provided by Ukrainian authorities and information obtained from Russia – both officially and unintentionally, the official said.
NATO estimates that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24. Using statistical averages from past conflicts that for every casualty roughly three soldiers are wounded, NATO analysts reach their total figure.
Russia began its invasion with roughly 190,000 troops. It has since brought in additional troops from Chechnya, Syria and other locations.
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Russia-Ukraine War: Latest News
Last Updated: Mar 23, 2022 at 11:55 am ET
Full coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
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18. NATO: 7,000 to 15,000 Russian troops dead in Ukraine
Although it is likely that enemy KIA reports are inflated it does seem like NATO and US analysis is catching up to what the Ukrainians have been reporting in the "War Bulletins."
Excerpts:
The most recent figure for Ukraine’s military losses came from Zelenskyy on March 12, when he said that about 1,300 Ukrainian servicemen had been killed in action.
The NATO official said 30,000 to 40,000 Russian soldiers are estimated to have been killed or wounded.
Russia has released very little information on its casualties, saying March 2 that nearly 500 soldiers had been killed and almost 1,600 wounded.
Ukraine also claims to have killed six Russian generals. Russia acknowledges just one dead general.
The figures from NATO represent the alliance’s first public estimate of Russian casualties since the war began. The U.S. government has largely declined to provide public estimates of Russian or Ukrainian casualties, saying available information is of questionable reliability.
With casualties mounting and quick victory no longer in sight, Russia is having to work to suppress dissent and shore up morale.
NATO: 7,000 to 15,000 Russian troops dead in Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine — NATO estimated on Wednesday that 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in four weeks of war in Ukraine, where ferocious fighting by the country’s fast-moving defenders has denied Moscow the lightning victory it sought.
By way of comparison, Moscow lost about 15,000 soldiers in Afghanistan over 10 years.
A senior NATO military official said the alliance’s estimate was based on information from Ukrainian officials, what Russia has released — intentionally or not — and intelligence gathered from open sources. The official spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by NATO.
When Russia unleashed its invasion Feb. 24 in Europe’s biggest offensive since World War II, a swift toppling of Ukraine’s democratically elected government seemed likely.
But with Wednesday marking four full weeks of fighting, Russia is bogged down in a grinding military campaign.
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Experts weigh in on the wider effects of how events in Ukraine may influence actions in the Pacific.
With its ground forces repeatedly slowed or stopped by hit-and-run Ukrainian units armed with Western-supplied weapons, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops are bombarding targets from afar, falling back on the tactics they used in reducing cities to ruins in Syria and Chechnya.
As U.S. President Joe Biden left for Europe on Wednesday to meet with key allies about possible new sanctions against Moscow and more military aid to Ukraine, he warned there is a “real threat” Russia could use chemical weapons.
Addressing Japan’s parliament on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said four weeks of war have killed thousands of his people, including at least 121 children.
“Our people cannot even adequately bury their murdered relatives, friends and neighbors. They have to be buried right in the yards of destroyed buildings, next to the roads,” he said.
Still, major Russian objectives remain unfulfilled. The capital, Kyiv, has been shelled repeatedly hit but is not even encircled.
Near-constant shelling and gunfire shook the city Wednesday, with plumes of black smoke rising from the western outskirts, where the two sides battled for control of multiple suburbs. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least 264 civilians have been killed in the capital since war broke out.
RELATED
U.S. European Command is considering hardship pay for soldiers who stay past 270 days.
In the south, the port city of Mariupol has seen the worst devastation of the war, under weeks of siege and bombardment. But Ukrainian forces have prevented its fall, thwarting an apparent bid by Moscow to fully secure a land bridge from Russia to Crimea, seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Zelenskyy said 100,000 civilians remain in a city that had 430,000 people. Efforts to get desperately needed food and other supplies to those trapped have often failed.
Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of seizing a humanitarian convoy. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the Russians were holding captive 11 bus drivers and four rescue workers along with their vehicles.
It is not clear how much of Mariupol is still under Ukrainian control. Fleeing residents say fighting continues street by street. In their last update, over a week ago, Mariupol officials said at least 2,300 people had died, but the true toll is probably much higher. Airstrikes in the past week destroyed a theater and an art school where civilians were sheltering.
In the besieged northern city of Chernihiv, Russian forces bombed and destroyed a bridge that was used for aid deliveries and civilian evacuations, regional governor Viacheslav Chaus said.
Kateryna Mytkevich, who arrived in Poland after fleeing Chernihiv, wiped away tears as she spoke about what she had seen. The city is without gas, electricity or running water, said Mytkevich, 39, and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed.
“I don’t understand why we have such a curse,” she said.
Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted the military operation is going “strictly in accordance” with plans.
A man trains in a shooting range in Lviv, western Ukraine, Wednesday, March 23, 2022. The rush for guns and gun training continued in the western city of Lviv. (Bernat Armangue/AP)
The most recent figure for Ukraine’s military losses came from Zelenskyy on March 12, when he said that about 1,300 Ukrainian servicemen had been killed in action.
The NATO official said 30,000 to 40,000 Russian soldiers are estimated to have been killed or wounded.
Russia has released very little information on its casualties, saying March 2 that nearly 500 soldiers had been killed and almost 1,600 wounded.
Ukraine also claims to have killed six Russian generals. Russia acknowledges just one dead general.
The figures from NATO represent the alliance’s first public estimate of Russian casualties since the war began. The U.S. government has largely declined to provide public estimates of Russian or Ukrainian casualties, saying available information is of questionable reliability.
With casualties mounting and quick victory no longer in sight, Russia is having to work to suppress dissent and shore up morale.
It has arrested thousands of antiwar protesters and cracked down on the media. Also, under a law passed Wednesday, troops in Ukraine will get the same benefits as veterans of previous wars, including tax breaks, discounts on utilities and preferential access to medical treatment.
In an apparent reflection of growing divisions in Russia’s top echelons, top official Anatoly Chubais has resigned, Peskov told the Interfax news agency. Chubais, the architect of Russia’s post-Soviet privatization campaign, had served at a variety of top official jobs over three decades. His latest role was as Putin’s envoy to international organizations.
Peskov would not say if Chubais had left the country.
Western officials say Putin’s forces are facing serious shortages of food, fuel and cold weather gear, with soldiers suffering frostbite, while Ukraine’s defenders have been going more on the offensive.
Still, Russia’s far stronger, bigger military has many Western military experts warning against overconfidence in Ukraine’s long-term odds. The Kremlin’s practice in past wars has been to grind down resistance with strikes that flattened cities, killing countless civilians and sending millions fleeing.
Talks to end the fighting have continued by video. Zelenskyy said negotiations with Russia are going “step by step, but they are going forward.”
With no peace, those not yet fighting prepared to do so.
“Everything’s a best-seller these days,” said Zakhar Sluzhalyy, who owns a gun shop in the western city of Lviv.
“We’re defending our land,” he said. “We’re fighting for our freedom and that of the rest of Europe.”
Anna reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Associated Press writers Robert Burns in Washington, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, and other AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.
19. War Crimes by Russia’s Forces in Ukraine
War Crimes by Russia’s Forces in Ukraine - United States Department of State
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
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War Crimes by Russia’s Forces in Ukraine
Press Statement
March 23, 2022
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Since launching his unprovoked and unjust war of choice, Russian President Vladimir Putin has unleashed unrelenting violence that has caused death and destruction across Ukraine. We’ve seen numerous credible reports of indiscriminate attacks and attacks deliberately targeting civilians, as well as other atrocities. Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded. Many of the sites Russia’s forces have hit have been clearly identifiable as in-use by civilians. This includes the Mariupol maternity hospital, as the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights expressly noted in a March 11 report. It also includes a strike that hit a Mariupol theater, clearly marked with the word “дети” — Russian for “children” — in huge letters visible from the sky. Putin’s forces used these same tactics in Grozny, Chechnya, and Aleppo, Syria, where they intensified their bombardment of cities to break the will of the people. Their attempt to do so in Ukraine has again shocked the world and, as President Zelenskyy has soberly attested, “bathed the people of Ukraine in blood and tears.”
Every day that Russia’s forces continue their brutal attacks, the number of innocent civilians killed and wounded, including women and children, climbs. As of March 22, officials in besieged Mariupol said that more than 2,400 civilians had been killed in that city alone. Not including the Mariupol devastation, the United Nations has officially confirmed more than 2,500 civilian casualties, including dead and wounded, and emphasizes the actual toll is likely higher.
Last week, I echoed President Biden’s statement, based on the countless accounts and images of destruction and suffering we have all seen, that war crimes had been committed by Putin’s forces in Ukraine. I noted then that the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. I emphasized that Department of State and other U.S. government experts were documenting and assessing potential war crimes in Ukraine.
Today, I can announce that, based on information currently available, the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine.
Our assessment is based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence sources. As with any alleged crime, a court of law with jurisdiction over the crime is ultimately responsible for determining criminal guilt in specific cases. The U.S. government will continue to track reports of war crimes and will share information we gather with allies, partners, and international institutions and organizations, as appropriate. We are committed to pursuing accountability using every tool available, including criminal prosecutions.
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
20. IntelBrief: How Will Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Impact its Influence Abroad?
Excerpt:
There are some regions of the world firmly in Russia’s camp. State-run media from countries in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has been overwhelmingly pro-Russia, recycling many of the same narratives depicted in right-wing Western media that portrays Russian President Vladimir Putin as tough and masculine. Russia’s remaining allies are few, however, and growing fewer by the day. Only five countries voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression for its invasion of Ukraine—North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, Russia itself, and Belarus. Putin has completely transformed Russia into a pariah state, with a reputation on par with Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, a country few want to be associated with given its vast human rights abuses and disregard for international law. China has mostly remained supportive of Russia, going to great lengths to avoid criticizing Putin and attempting to portray its motives as that of a peacemaker or mediator between Moscow and Kyiv. One of the unintended consequences of Putin’s ill-fated invasion could be to accelerate China’s rise while crystallizing a more subservient role for Russia in the countries’ partnership going forward, with Moscow increasingly dependent on Chinese assistance to provide an economic and diplomatic lifeline.
IntelBrief: How Will Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Impact its Influence Abroad? - The Soufan Center
March 24, 2022
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IntelBrief: How Will Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Impact its Influence Abroad?
Alexei Nikolsky, via AP
Bottom Line Up Front
- The poor performance of Russia’s military in Ukraine will have a negative impact on Moscow’s influence abroad, including in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
- Without a reputation for a strong military, Russian military deployments, already associated with a blatant disregard for human rights, will become less attractive.
- Russia’s performance could also lead to geopolitical tumult throughout its near abroad, with traditional Russian partners reconsidering what it means to be a vassal state and looking to alternative guarantors of security.
- Some Gulf countries are firmly in Russia’s camp, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with state media promoting pro-Russian narratives and focusing on the machismo of Putin while downplaying Moscow’s battlefield losses.
After four weeks of fighting in Ukraine, the Russian military is stalled and as a result, has resorted to indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and the bombardment of infrastructure. Ukraine has fought with determination, despite the odds, and recent reports even suggest Ukrainian counteroffensives in some areas of southern Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a conflict that, early on, many analysts believed would look similar to the Russian offensive in Georgia in August 2008, an operation that lasted approximately twelve days. Yet, the Russian military has performed poorly, plagued by shoddy logistics, low morale, and weak command-and-control. If Ukraine continues to inflict high losses on Russia’s military, with approximately 10,000 soldiers reportedly already killed in battle, it will have an immediate and tangible impact on Russia’s influence abroad. As it stands, Moscow has been isolated financially and ostracized by nation-states and multinational corporations throughout the world.
To respond to losses on the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia has called back manpower from the Middle East and Africa, with reports suggesting Wagner mercenaries were being relocated to assist with the fight in Ukraine. By drawing down resources in Syria, Moscow is ceding influence to Tehran, which is working to consolidate its own gains in the Levant as Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad looks to be accepted once again by countries in the region. By drawing down assets in Africa, including Mali, Mozambique, Libya, and the Central African Republic (CAR), Russia will be seen as unreliable. Moscow’s involvement in African countries was already viewed as rapacious, a swap of security for access to precious gems, minerals, and other resources that was highly sought after because it came with no strings attached. Russia’s poor military performance will negatively impact its image abroad, making it less likely for nation-states to seek out Russian training and military-to-military relationships. Without a reputation for a strong military, Russian military deployments, already associated with a blatant disregard for human rights, will become less attractive.
Between losses of soldiers, vehicles, and equipment, Russia will likely be forced to scale down its overseas deployments, working instead to rebuild its military. There will need to be a wholesale assessment by the Russian government of what went wrong in Ukraine and how Moscow can repair the damage to its armed forces and its reputation. Russia’s performance could also lead to geopolitical tumult throughout its near abroad, with longstanding Russian partners and allies reconsidering what it means to be a vassal state and looking abroad to non-traditional guarantors of security. In Central Asia, this could mean China assuming a more direct role in regional security organizations, seizing the opportunity to pull countries closer to Beijing and away from Moscow’s orbit.
There are some regions of the world firmly in Russia’s camp. State-run media from countries in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has been overwhelmingly pro-Russia, recycling many of the same narratives depicted in right-wing Western media that portrays Russian President Vladimir Putin as tough and masculine. Russia’s remaining allies are few, however, and growing fewer by the day. Only five countries voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression for its invasion of Ukraine—North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, Russia itself, and Belarus. Putin has completely transformed Russia into a pariah state, with a reputation on par with Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, a country few want to be associated with given its vast human rights abuses and disregard for international law. China has mostly remained supportive of Russia, going to great lengths to avoid criticizing Putin and attempting to portray its motives as that of a peacemaker or mediator between Moscow and Kyiv. One of the unintended consequences of Putin’s ill-fated invasion could be to accelerate China’s rise while crystallizing a more subservient role for Russia in the countries’ partnership going forward, with Moscow increasingly dependent on Chinese assistance to provide an economic and diplomatic lifeline.
21. Putin’s Afghanistan: Ukraine and the Lessons of the Soviets’ Afghan War
Putin's War is Putin's Afghanistan. Two key points in this conclusion. There is a bad recent history of countering insurgencies and can Putin be removed ad before escalation?
The record of recent insurgencies suggests that the odds will be sharply against Putin in any prolonged occupation. In the decades since the end of World War II, nationalist-based insurgencies against foreign invading forces have almost always prevailed, as Afghan resistance fighters did against the Soviet Union. This puts Putin in a vulnerable position: either he wins and quickly pacifies Ukraine—a most unlikely outcome—or he orders a withdrawal of his troops from the country after he declares his “special military operation” successfully completed. The personal humiliation of such a move would likely be too much for Putin. He is approaching his 23rd year as Russia’s leader, about seven years short of his personal goal of exceeding Joseph Stalin’s 30 years at the helm. The options open to him are narrowing by the day, and further complicating any assessment of his likely actions is the growing suggestion that he is unhinged and capable of taking the unthinkable step of using nuclear weapons, as he has repeatedly threatened to do. The nagging suspicions regarding Putin’s state of mind can only serve to force the United States and its NATO allies to place themselves, quietly and without public pronouncement, on their own highest levels of alert, including regarding the nuclear option.
If Putin is to be taken out of the game before he escalates to the unthinkable, it will most certainly take his own military or intelligence people to accomplish the task. As the war in Ukraine drags on day by day and the international media reports on Russian atrocities and civilian casualties, the world continues to turn on Moscow. Although Putin may have started this war to remedy what he sees as the tragedy of the Soviet dissolution, he may well be replicating the disastrous war that precipitated that collapse in the first place—and jeopardizing his own future in the process.
Putin’s Afghanistan
Ukraine and the Lessons of the Soviets’ Afghan War
By Milton Bearden
March 24, 2022
As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has progressed, it is clear that almost nothing has gone according to plan. Far from being greeted as liberators, Russian forces have been treated as hated enemies; instead of quickly capitulating, the Ukrainians have shown they are determined to stop the Russian advance and fight at all costs. Even at this point, a month into what will undoubtedly become a much longer engagement than Putin estimated, reports abound that the Russian campaign has been plagued by supply issues and low morale. Already, the war shows signs of becoming what the Institute for the Study of War has described as a “stalemate.” Perhaps most striking, U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the Russian military lost more than 7000 soldiers in the first 20 days of the war alone, as well as five Russian generals in the past month. By all indications, there is no clear path to victory for Russia absent a massive escalation, and the war has already proved perilously costly to the Kremlin—and especially to Putin himself.
For those who remember late Soviet history, there is a familiar analog to these events: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. As with the war in Ukraine, the invasion of Afghanistan was driven by the fear that Moscow was losing a crucial piece of its sphere of influence. With Afghanistan, the Soviet leadership believed, as Putin apparently did about Ukraine, that the war would be quick and easy, that its troops would have no problem handling whatever resistance they might encounter, and that the United States and its allies, distracted by other events, would not mount an effective response. And like Putin, the Soviets assumed that it would be easy to install a puppet government in the newly conquered territory.
None of this turned out to be true. Instead, Afghanistan quickly turned into the most disastrous Russian foreign military engagement of the postwar era. Afghan insurgents quickly organized into effective guerrilla forces and created safe havens in Pakistan, where they were armed and trained by Pakistani intelligence officers. Within weeks of the Soviet invasion, U.S. President Jimmy Carter formed an alliance with Pakistan—an effort that was soon joined by China, Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia—to support the Afghan resistance. Deeply unprepared for what would be arrayed against them, Soviet forces dug their heels into what turned into a grinding decadelong war that undermined morale at home, drained Soviet coffers, and eventually precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Of course, Russia in 2022 is not the Soviet Union of 1979. But given the striking similarities that have already emerged between Putin’s Ukraine adventure and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, it is worth examining the defining features of that earlier conflict and its far-reaching consequences. If the Ukraine invasion continues to unfold as it has so far and becomes Russia’s bleeding wound of the twenty-first century, it could, as the Afghan war did for the Soviets, threaten the survival of Putin’s regime—and Putin himself.
LEARNING THE WRONG LESSONS
Unlike Putin’s clumsy preparations for the invasion of Ukraine—botched in part because of U.S. intelligence revelations exposing Moscow’s intent to attack—the Soviet plans for Afghanistan unfolded in secret. In late 1979, KGB intelligence analyses had wrongly concluded that Afghanistan was sliding into the West’s orbit and that a U.S. military base in the country would allow the United States to completely encircle the USSR with nuclear missiles. Soviet leaders also feared that if Afghanistan were pulled into Washington’s sphere of influence, it could trigger a domino effect among the nations of the Warsaw Pact. According to the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed that a threat to socialist rule in any Soviet bloc country was a threat to all socialist states, these fears justified military intervention. Thus, on December 12, 1979, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, KGB Chair Yuri Andropov, and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko drafted a proposal to dispatch a “limited contingent” of the Soviet army to Afghanistan with a short and targeted intervention in mind. A dozen days later, the Soviet invasion began.
In its initial phase, the Soviet invasion was far more successful than Putin’s in Ukraine. On a snowy Christmas Eve, Soviet airborne troops—along with special units of the OMON, the militia division of the Soviet Interior Ministry—quickly seized strategic targets in Kabul, assassinated Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin and key members of his ruling team, and replaced him with their handpicked man, the pro-Soviet Babrak Karmal, who rode into Kabul on the tanks of the Soviet invaders. They moved occupation forces into Afghanistan’s major cities—Jalalabad in the east, Kandahar in the south, Herat in the west, and Mazar-e Sharif in the north. Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, quickly became a Soviet Air Force base. Within a few weeks, the Soviet Union had brought Afghanistan under the semblance of control.
As with Putin in Ukraine, however, the Soviets badly underestimated the Western response. At the time the decision to attack Afghanistan was made, the KGB assessments had indicated that the United States would be unlikely to seriously challenge the invasion. The Americans had withdrawn from Vietnam just a few years earlier, and the presumably weak U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, was preoccupied with the American hostage crisis in Iran. But the West was on a much higher alert than the Russians anticipated. Fearing that failure to respond could embolden the USSR’s international ambitions, President Carter swiftly moved to cancel new consular agreements and major wheat sales with the Soviet Union and issued a boycott of the upcoming 1980 Moscow Olympics. Behind the scenes, he also ordered the CIA to covertly begin supplying the Afghan resistance movement with equipment, including lethal materials. Within weeks, the CIA had delivered thousands of Enfield .303 rifles to Pakistan for distribution to the mujahideen, and was soon sending rockets, mortars, and rifles, as well. Total U.S. funding for the Afghan resistance grew from about $100 million in the first year to $500 million in the fourth year; in the last two years of the war, it would top $1 billion.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine looks even shakier than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The failure of the Soviet Union to anticipate both the strength of the resistance and the extent of Western support had devastating consequences. What Soviet leaders had assumed would be a quick and easy military intervention turned into a bloody decadelong struggle. The human devastation of the conflict reverberated throughout the region: around a million Afghans were killed, a million and a half were wounded, three million sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan, and an unknown number were internally displaced—all out of a population of fewer than 20 million people. The Soviet Union itself eventually admitted to having lost more than 15,000 soldiers in the conflict, although that number is probably much closer to 25,000. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the Soviet leaders who had launched the Red Army into Afghanistan had passed from the scene, but the USSR was continuing to pour blood, treasure, and its international reputation into the war. Eventually, with the U.S.-armed Afghan resistance increasingly on the march, Gorbachev gave his commanders a year to turn around the situation, but they could not. On February 15, 1989, the Soviets finally withdrew.
Signaling the Soviets’ defeat, the withdrawal from Afghanistan set in motion a stunning series of events that would change the world. Countries within the Soviet bloc and the Warsaw Pact saw an exhausted Soviet Union leave Afghanistan, and rightly concluded that the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, would have little stomach for new military adventures. Thus, in May 1989, the Hungarian government, perhaps the most cerebral of the Soviet partners, cut the barbed wire fences on its border with Austria, allowing hundreds of East Germans to escape to West Germany. The following month, in the first free elections in over six decades, the people of Poland cast their ballots for the Polish dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa, effectively voting out over four decades of communism. That summer, East Germany’s antigovernment Monday demonstrations grew in numbers and sheer force until the night of November 9, 1989, when crowds of East German protesters breached the Berlin Wall. Less than a year later, Czechoslovakia and Romania had followed suit in breaking with Moscow, East and West Germany were reunified—as a member of NATO—and in 1991, Ukraine declared independence. On Boxing Day of 1991, a small group of Russian soldiers marched out on the Kremlin wall, lowered the red and gold hammer and sickle for the last time, and hoisted the Russian white, blue, and red tricolor.
It was these traumatic events—precipitated at least in part by the Afghan disaster—that Putin witnessed as a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany. The memory of the Soviet collapse has driven him to declare it “the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century,” but he appears to have taken the wrong lesson from those events. Paradoxically, in an effort to reconstruct his vision of the lost Russian empire and reclaim Ukraine from what he takes to be Washington’s sphere of influence, he has launched his own Afghan-like invasion. In setting out to reverse history, he may instead be repeating it.
REPLICATING DISASTER
If anything, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine looks even shakier than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The televised meetings of Russia’s Security Council indicate that Putin’s closest advisers, unlike Brezhnev’s Politburo, were not entirely briefed on the invasion plans and may have had their own misgivings. And in contrast to the Soviets’ initial success, Putin’s invasion has been poorly executed from the start, with failure to seize or control major cities and casualty counts in the first few weeks that would take the Soviets years to amass in Afghanistan.
Moreover, Putin has met far more resistance in Ukraine than Soviet forces initially met in Afghanistan, which may lead him to resort to more violent tactics. Already, Russian attacks on hospitals, residential buildings, and a crowded theater have caused President Biden to brand Putin a “war criminal,” to which he has responded by petulantly declared that he might break off all diplomatic relations with the United States. If Putin follows the pattern that he has shown in his previous wars in Grozny and Syria, he will likely use tactics the Soviets employed in their failed Afghan enterprise that resulted in an estimated one-third of the Afghan population killed, wounded, or displaced internally or into Iran and Pakistan.
At this stage, unless there is a negotiated settlement—an unlikely event—it seems that Putin will seek to seize and occupy Kyiv after a bitter and violent fight with its heavily armed civilian population. This task alone may prove extremely difficult and could take weeks or months of costly fighting. It is far from certain that Putin could take Kyiv with conventional tactics. But even if he is successful in taking Kyiv—removing the Zelensky government and replacing it with handpicked pro-Russian quislings—Moscow’s troubles could be just beginning. As in Afghanistan forty-odd years ago, Putin would likely face a relentless, heavily armed insurgency, covertly backed by a Western coalition similar to the one that pushed the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
If the Ukraine invasion continues to unfold as it has so far, it could threaten the survival of Putin’s regime.
Ukraine’s size alone will present formidable problems to any Russian occupation. As large as Texas, it has a population of over 40 million people—twice as many as Afghanistan’s in 1979—and is not isolated, landlocked, mountainous, and forbidding like Afghanistan, where mules and all-terrain vehicles were required to deliver arms to the Afghan resistance. Ukraine is also a reasonably modern country with decent roads and transportation networks. It has 850 miles of land and maritime borders with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania: all NATO countries. And although it lacks the rugged, mountainous terrain that helped the Afghan insurgents effectively counter a heavily armed Soviet Army, Ukraine’s vast geography, strong communication networks, and proximity to Western powers give its insurgents a great advantage.
As with the Afghan resistance in the 1980s, with its safe havens in Pakistan, a Ukrainian insurgency could also benefit from staging areas in neighboring countries. Already, millions of Ukrainian refugees crossing into these bordering NATO countries are being met with sympathy and support. In the coming days and weeks, as the war moves toward engulfing the entire country, these refugees are likely to be joined by growing numbers of fighting-age Ukrainians. These fighters will be seeking not refuge but safe havens, where they will begin to organize, train, and arm themselves as a roughly coherent resistance force against the Russian occupation of their country. With the United States and its NATO allies already funding and arming the budding insurgency against Russia, it will not be long before Putin finds himself pitted against a well-armed resistance movement that could make the occupation simply too politically, socially, and economically costly to sustain. As in Afghanistan, supply problems and morale issues among the occupying forces could reach a level that cannot be sustained.
The record of recent insurgencies suggests that the odds will be sharply against Putin in any prolonged occupation. In the decades since the end of World War II, nationalist-based insurgencies against foreign invading forces have almost always prevailed, as Afghan resistance fighters did against the Soviet Union. This puts Putin in a vulnerable position: either he wins and quickly pacifies Ukraine—a most unlikely outcome—or he orders a withdrawal of his troops from the country after he declares his “special military operation” successfully completed. The personal humiliation of such a move would likely be too much for Putin. He is approaching his 23rd year as Russia’s leader, about seven years short of his personal goal of exceeding Joseph Stalin’s 30 years at the helm. The options open to him are narrowing by the day, and further complicating any assessment of his likely actions is the growing suggestion that he is unhinged and capable of taking the unthinkable step of using nuclear weapons, as he has repeatedly threatened to do. The nagging suspicions regarding Putin’s state of mind can only serve to force the United States and its NATO allies to place themselves, quietly and without public pronouncement, on their own highest levels of alert, including regarding the nuclear option.
If Putin is to be taken out of the game before he escalates to the unthinkable, it will most certainly take his own military or intelligence people to accomplish the task. As the war in Ukraine drags on day by day and the international media reports on Russian atrocities and civilian casualties, the world continues to turn on Moscow. Although Putin may have started this war to remedy what he sees as the tragedy of the Soviet dissolution, he may well be replicating the disastrous war that precipitated that collapse in the first place—and jeopardizing his own future in the process.
22. Don’t Underestimate the Bear—Russia Is One of the World’s Most Effective Modern Counterinsurgents
A counterpoint to Milton Bearden's Foreign Affairs article today.
A sober assessment:
This track record suggests that if a Ukrainian insurgency materializes, any counterinsurgency effort will be aimed at establishing unquestioned dominance through the use of massive force. Russia has already sought to shape its domestic public opinion by prohibiting dissent and using state-controlled media to mobilize popular support for the war. And there are already many reports of indiscriminate firepower. This all bodes ill for Ukrainians: even without an insurgency, most characteristics that allow for the implementation of brutal authoritarian counterinsurgency are already in place. The threat of “Groznyfication” is real.
Little more is needed for the Russian armed forces to fully unleash a campaign of massive, indiscriminate violence in order to break the resolve of the Ukrainian population. Similarly, collective punishment—despite its absence in other recent campaigns—cannot be excluded as some of the preconditions are in place. Especially in areas where Russia succeeds in establishing military dominance, repression and even forced migration through refugee corridors could be an option.
So much for Russian attempts to win local hearts. As for converting local minds, thus far, Russian troops seem to enjoy little support across Ukrainian society. But it is not hard to imagine that under the pressure of brutal violence some local agents might start to collaborate in order to establish a new political order in occupied territories. The Russians have almost certainly already identified potential candidates for co-optation.
The outlook is especially grim if the Ukrainian war develops into a full-blown insurgency. Such an insurgency will prove costly to the Russian armed forces, but the costs for Ukrainians may well be much higher. For now, the challenge for the irregular warfare community is to identify the best ways to offer resistance tactics, techniques, and procedures in the face of a likely Russian counterinsurgency—all while trying to limit the costs to Ukrainian civilians.
Don’t Underestimate the Bear—Russia Is One of the World’s Most Effective Modern Counterinsurgents - Modern War Institute
The Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on. So far, Ukrainian conventional forces and resistance groups have mounted a stiff defense against Russia’s numerically superior forces. The Ukrainian people, meanwhile, have rallied behind their government and seem willing to join the fight. Over the past few weeks, civilians have blocked armor with their bodies and prepared Molotov cocktails; Ukrainian women and children have started weaving camouflage netting; and civilian casualties from Russian fire are mounting. All of this is deliberately disseminated through a savvy Ukrainian social media campaign that has successfully reverberated in Western countries.
The conflict can best be characterized as what Rupert Smith has called a war among the people, in which “civilians are the targets, objectives to be won, as much as an opposing force.” It is no wonder, therefore, that many analysts and observers have urged Ukraine to adopt a strategy based on irregular warfare. Since the overwhelming Russian forces may well end up occupying at least part of the country, a Ukrainian insurgency will be part of the armed resistance. Any such insurgency will be long and bloody. But so far, most commentary on the topic has overlooked the grim but successful track record of Russian counterinsurgencies. Policymakers need to grapple with the brutal reality of Russia’s approach if they are to predict how Russian forces might react when confronted with a Ukrainian insurgency armed with advanced weaponry.
The Logic of Russian Counterinsurgency
There are two primary ways of countering insurgencies: states can either try to win hearts and minds or crush them. Both distill down to the challenge of fighting an elusive enemy hiding among the people. Modern Western military thought considers such a fight an indirect, population-centric approach hinging on the state’s ability to enhance the populace’s collaboration with the government. This assumes that strengthening the ties between people and state authorities augments the latter’s legitimacy while simultaneously weakening the insurgent’s position.
But while this approach emphasizes collaboration, there are other potential pathways toward control. Stathis Kalyvas, for example, has pointed out how the use of force can lead to more or less unquestioned dominance. Here, occupying forces can establish control through effective sanctions aimed at insurgents and their supporters. They use force to neutralize opponents and coerce people to comply with the government. Typically, the identification problem caused by the elusive nature of the opponent makes it particularly hard to target these sanctions and therefore indiscriminate violence and collective punishment are common. Thus, instead of enhancing governmental legitimacy this brutal, so-called authoritarian approach essentially revolves around gaining control through repression.
Recent Russian military campaigns in Chechnya and Syria, which featured indiscriminate violence and collective punishment, make clear that modern Russian armed forces adhere to an authoritarian counterinsurgency strategy. Moreover, an analysis of the historical track record reveals that this brutal approach has not only become a trademark of Russian counterinsurgency but has also brought unprecedented success. Of the twenty-four rebellions and insurgencies encountered between 1917 and 2017 Russia (or the Soviet Union) “won” twenty-one of these conflicts—an astonishing 87.5 percent—where “won” means that “the insurgency is militarily defeated and its organization destroyed, or the war ends without any political concessions granted to insurgent forces.” This makes Russia one of the world’s most effective modern counterinsurgents.
Ukraine may represent an outlier for Russia: unlike the Chechens, Dagestanis, and Ingush, the Ukrainians have a substantial number of conventional military units, including an effective drone air force, that are working alongside pro-Ukrainian militias, territorial defense units, and resistance groups. The Russian approach may struggle against a more professionalized insurgent force with modern weaponry. But analysts would be unwise to write Russia off too quickly.
There are five characteristics of an authoritarian approach to counterinsurgency. First, authoritarian regimes have a stronger grip on information than democracies. While these regimes are not immune to dissent, their control of information offers a powerful tool for protecting their hold on power and silencing critics.
Second, and related, an authoritarian state’s monopoly on information can be used for mobilizing mass support at home for even the most brutal of campaigns. Key here is that in the logic of the authoritarian approach, information operations focus on selling the threat of the insurgency to domestic audiences and not on winning over the hearts and minds of the local population. The aim is to demonstrate the necessity of the use of force against insurgents and their supporters.
Third is the deliberate use of massive and often indiscriminate violence. This seeks to prevent the insurgents from mobilizing popular support while simultaneously augmenting governmental control. The fragmentation of society that results from such violence denies opponents the ability to build or sustain solid ties with local communities. For this purpose, “coercive engineered migrations” might also be adopted. As a result, the insurgency will become more isolated as it is deprived of popular support and sanctuary.
Fourth is the concept of “Holding, Suppressing, Controlling.” This effectively boils down to the imposition of a police state. Physical control of territory and people gives the state the ability to monitor cooperation and trumps achieving any sense of legitimacy among the local population. When satisfied with the level of control, locally recruited paramilitary, police, and intelligence forces will gradually take over from the armed forces. This is all about imposing and sustaining an effective apparatus for punishing any dissent as swiftly and severely as possible in order to achieve a deterrent effect.
Finally, even authoritarian governments have to persuade the population to accept the new balance of power. They typically do so by interposing the state in every local societal transaction and activity and thus rendering it indispensable to public life.
The Brutal Reality of Russian Counterinsurgency
The most eye-catching feature of Russian counterinsurgency is its brutality, or more precisely its heavy reliance on massive force and suppression in the form of indiscriminate violence and collective punishment. The specific use of both methods and their interaction depends on capabilities and local regime characteristics. Historically, Russia has employed indiscriminate violence when its capabilities have been limited. In such cases the counterinsurgent was weakly rooted in the target society and local asymmetries favored the insurgency. Collective punishment, by contrast, has been most commonly observed under Russian regimes with strong capabilities and a sufficient degree of state penetration in the local population. In both cases, unquestioned dominance is achieved by unleashing brutal force on people living within the territory in which an insurgency takes place. Such efforts tend to be supported by subjecting Russian society as a whole to measures for curtailing dissent and mobilizing popular support. In fact, the Russian government’s thinking about cutting itself off from the global internet reflects a similar desire to control the information space for its domestic audience.
The use of indiscriminate firepower is generally a response to the difficulties in coordinating combined arms operations in tough terrain in which the population is mostly on the side of the insurgents. This has resulted in the primacy of artillery in Russian ground combat power in counterinsurgencies. Substituting firepower for infantry makes it possible to save soldiers’ lives by avoiding close combat. This reliance is heightened in areas where local support for Russia is elusive. During the Soviet-Afghan War, for example, massive fire support was the weapon of choice to limit risk to Russian soldiers and to compensate for the relatively low numbers of available infantry. Herat, a city that had been in guerrilla hands even before the Soviet invasion, was shelled to such an extent that three quarters of the center was obliterated. More recently, Russian airpower has been deployed to accompany conventional and thermobaric artillery in bombing the likes of Grozny and Aleppo into submission. Indiscriminate firepower is an enduring trait of the Russian approach to counterinsurgency; it will most likely be deployed in any future scenario in which insurgents hold an advantage.
When regime capabilities are strong, Russia tends to adopt collective punishment as its main vehicle for establishing control. Throughout modern Russian history, the Russian state has regularly turned to forced resettlement as one of its most extreme forms of repression in counterinsurgencies. The objective of such drastic measures is to target an insurgency’s tangible support in order to deny provision of goods and food, gathering of intelligence, and mobilization of new recruits. The application of collective punishment is also intended to set an example and deter the remaining local population from supporting insurgents. Of course, the operational challenges of this approach are manifold, and it’s unclear whether Russia would resort to such measures in Ukraine. But collective punishment remains a potential feature of the Russian counterinsurgency toolkit.
Once Russian armed forces have restored security, the results of the counterinsurgency campaign are consolidated and sustained through “reconstruction by local government.” This particular form of state building focuses on rebuilding governmental institutions by using local allies to reestablish political power according to the customs of the target society. This entails co-opting powerful leaders from within that society. Clientelism tends to result: the new local leaders remain heavily dependent on Moscow. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov both epitomize the success of this approach.
A Grim Outlook
This track record suggests that if a Ukrainian insurgency materializes, any counterinsurgency effort will be aimed at establishing unquestioned dominance through the use of massive force. Russia has already sought to shape its domestic public opinion by prohibiting dissent and using state-controlled media to mobilize popular support for the war. And there are already many reports of indiscriminate firepower. This all bodes ill for Ukrainians: even without an insurgency, most characteristics that allow for the implementation of brutal authoritarian counterinsurgency are already in place. The threat of “Groznyfication” is real.
Little more is needed for the Russian armed forces to fully unleash a campaign of massive, indiscriminate violence in order to break the resolve of the Ukrainian population. Similarly, collective punishment—despite its absence in other recent campaigns—cannot be excluded as some of the preconditions are in place. Especially in areas where Russia succeeds in establishing military dominance, repression and even forced migration through refugee corridors could be an option.
So much for Russian attempts to win local hearts. As for converting local minds, thus far, Russian troops seem to enjoy little support across Ukrainian society. But it is not hard to imagine that under the pressure of brutal violence some local agents might start to collaborate in order to establish a new political order in occupied territories. The Russians have almost certainly already identified potential candidates for co-optation.
The outlook is especially grim if the Ukrainian war develops into a full-blown insurgency. Such an insurgency will prove costly to the Russian armed forces, but the costs for Ukrainians may well be much higher. For now, the challenge for the irregular warfare community is to identify the best ways to offer resistance tactics, techniques, and procedures in the face of a likely Russian counterinsurgency—all while trying to limit the costs to Ukrainian civilians.
Dr. Martijn Kitzen is a senior nonresident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative and a professor at the Netherlands Defence Academy where he holds the chair of irregular warfare & special operations.
Major Marnix Provoost, MA is an infantry officer in the Royal Netherlands Army and a PhD student at the Netherlands Defence Academy, examining the analogies between state formation and insurgencies.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the Dutch Ministry of Defence.
23. The will to fight in the age of social media
Excerpts:
This all has implications for the U.S. and the Department of Defense. RAND research and the events in Ukraine show how critical will to fight is to combat outcomes. Further, in a connected world of social media, images and messages can quickly tell a story that powerfully supports or degrades will to fight.
Will to fight is hard to assess (it’s a lot easier to count tanks), and with rare exceptions early assessments of Russia’s prospects in Ukraine largely ignored will to fight and focused on materiel. But the United States and its allies may need to understand and account for it.
NATO has made important improvements in its capabilities and is working on improving readiness, but how will its units react on the battlefield? How will its leaders react to various invasion scenarios involving member states? How well is the will to fight of military units and political leaders in China and Taiwan understood? DOD may need a doctrinal definition of will to fight to incorporate into planning, modeling and simulations, wargaming, and analysis. Failing to do so could degrade U.S. military preparedness, and that could make conflict more likely, not less likely.
The will to fight in the age of social media
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t gone as expected — instead of rolling across the country in a few days, unexpectedly stiff resistance from Ukraine’s military — and civilians — has confounded Russian military leaders. It appears that the Kremlin, and many Western analysts, underestimated Ukrainian military capacity, but even more important, their will to fight.
RAND research on will to fight at the tactical and operational level of battle, as well as at the geopolitical level of nation-states, has argued for the importance of understanding will to fight: the most important factor in war, but also the least understood.
Many people equate will to fight with morale, but it’s much more than that. Other factors like leadership, training, ideology, cohesion, control, competence and support all contribute. Right now, we are watching the decisive role these human factors play in war, street by street as Ukraine’s military, people, and political leaders have committed to staying in the fight against what appeared to be insurmountable odds. This willingness to stay in the fight has flipped the script, helping galvanize world opinion and putting pressure on Russia’s will to fight, both in the field and on the homefront.
Information — stories and images — has always played a powerful role in shaping and sustaining the will to fight. But in an age of social media, the sheer volume of that information and its ubiquity and speed of transmission can both amplify its power and create challenges for government leaders: quantity has a quality all its own.
Social media messaging has played a decisive role in bolstering Ukraine’s will to fight. Hall of Fame boxer and Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko took to Instagram to broadcast his intention to join the fight to defend his city, and images of him in uniform manning a crew-served weapon are making the rounds of social media. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s quip “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride,” became an instant internet sensation, spawning meme after meme.
Tales like the Ghost of Kyiv pilot may or may not be an urban legend—but that doesn’t matter. Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island saying, “Russian Warship: go f*** yourself,” instantly went viral as the “NUTS!” moment of the 21st century. What matters is words, images and actions that send a message: “We’re not folding up. We’re going to fight them and win.”
Additionally, Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly underestimated several factors that have influenced Ukraine’s national will to fight. First, the national identity of Ukrainians has proven far stronger than he apparently expected. Second, the stakes can’t be higher for Ukrainians — this is an existential threat — whereas Russians are fighting for … what exactly? Third, allies matter, and although countries are not sending their own troops to Ukraine, the world is clearly in Ukraine’s corner, except for … well … Belarus. Finally, the free world may have even surprised itself with its willingness to use its economic levers of power to influence this fight. And social media has been there every day, every hour, every minute to document the power of these factors and sometimes amplify their effects.
This all has implications for the U.S. and the Department of Defense. RAND research and the events in Ukraine show how critical will to fight is to combat outcomes. Further, in a connected world of social media, images and messages can quickly tell a story that powerfully supports or degrades will to fight.
Will to fight is hard to assess (it’s a lot easier to count tanks), and with rare exceptions early assessments of Russia’s prospects in Ukraine largely ignored will to fight and focused on materiel. But the United States and its allies may need to understand and account for it.
NATO has made important improvements in its capabilities and is working on improving readiness, but how will its units react on the battlefield? How will its leaders react to various invasion scenarios involving member states? How well is the will to fight of military units and political leaders in China and Taiwan understood? DOD may need a doctrinal definition of will to fight to incorporate into planning, modeling and simulations, wargaming, and analysis. Failing to do so could degrade U.S. military preparedness, and that could make conflict more likely, not less likely.
William Marcellino is a senior behavioral scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corp. and Michael McNerney is acting director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center and a senior researcher. Both are faculty members at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
24. As allies meet, splits emerge in NATO about how to deter Russia
President Biden has to exercise decisive leadership and keep NATO united and focused.
Excerpts:
The debate about how to maintain pressure on Russia — while trying to avoid escalating the situation — will continue among leaders in Brussels on Thursday. The Eastern European nations that border Russia — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — have been requesting additional troops and more advanced antiaircraft capabilities, which they say would make clear to the Kremlin that NATO is capable of backing up its warnings with military might. Since 2016, the alliance has maintained about 1,000 rotating troops in each of the four countries, enough to serve as a tripwire, but not enough to defend against a Russian invasion, and the Baltic states could easily be severed from the rest of NATO territory if Russian troops cut off the 40-mile corridor that connects Poland to Lithuania.
After Putin made some miscalculations about Ukraine, to leave NATO’s eastern flank lightly reinforced could risk that he would make the same mistake about alliance territory, said Jonatan Vseviov, the secretary general of the Estonian Foreign Ministry.
“These miscalculations make it at least plausible that he would miscalculate regarding the whole viable reinforcement part as well,” Vseviov said. “That’s end-of-the-world dangerous.”
In the short run, alliance leaders are expected to focus elsewhere, by deploying new troops to Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia — NATO countries that ring Ukraine and the Black Sea and are close to the current fighting.
Biden backers in Washington say that this week’s discussions in Europe should help address whatever splits exist.
“This is exactly why a long, detailed in-person conversation with the heads of state and the chiefs of defense is critical, because we will succeed in deterring Putin only to the extent we are united,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.).
As allies meet, splits emerge in NATO about how to deter Russia
The Washington Post · by Michael Birnbaum, Karoun Demirjian and John Hudson Today at 3:58 p.m. EDT · March 23, 2022
As President Biden landed in Brussels on Wednesday for urgent talks about Russia’s war on Ukraine, splits were emerging within NATO and in Washington about how to deter the Kremlin from further escalation. Allied leaders are discussing whether it is best to keep Russia guessing about what will trigger a bigger military response or to outline precisely what would draw NATO into a conflict.
Some NATO policymakers in Europe worry that there has been too much public messaging about what the alliance won’t do — send its troops into Ukraine, nor, for the moment, send fighter jets for which Kyiv has been campaigning. With the threat of Russian nuclear and chemical weapons looming over the battlefields of Ukraine, a better approach, they say, would be not to rule out anything publicly.
The stakes could not be higher, with officials on both sides of the debate agreed that a mishandled response could draw NATO and Russia into a direct conflict, with potentially calamitous consequences for the world. The discussion extends both to what to do for Ukraine and how best to bolster NATO’s defenses within its own territory to deter Russia from attacking.
“We are determined to do all we can to support Ukraine, but we have a responsibility to ensure that the war does not escalate beyond Ukraine, and become a conflict between NATO and Russia,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Wednesday, summing up the dilemma.
When asked what NATO would do if Russia were to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, Stoltenberg kept his answer vague — a traditional approach that was used to for decades to maintain strategic ambiguity about how nuclear weapons would be used as well.
“Any use of chemical weapons would totally change the nature of the conflict and have far-reaching consequences,” he said.
Critics of the U.S. handling of deterrence say that by being so clear about what the United States won’t do for Ukraine, Washington is potentially emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin to act more aggressively than he otherwise would.
“I don’t think this is very productive when we say every so often, ‘We don’t want World War 3,’ or ‘We don’t want conflict with Russia,’ ” said Marko Mihkelson, the head of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian parliament, who was in Washington last week to lobby for additional troops and equipment for NATO’s eastern flank. “That’s a green light to the Russians that we’re afraid of them.”
Defenders of the Biden administration’s approach say that the White House has helped deliver unprecedented sanctions against the Russian economy and is in the middle of a large-scale effort to deliver defensive weaponry to Ukraine. And NATO leaders, meeting at a summit in Brussels on Thursday, are expected to announce new deployments to the alliance countries that border Ukraine.
“The president has the responsibility to make clear our goal is to make sure to bring this war to an end,” said a senior Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the dispute. “To that end, we have made clear, we’re not going to take steps that would expand this war, put more lives at risk and that could lead to a much larger conflict. That is a responsible approach and that is one centered on saving lives and bringing an end to this conflict as quickly as we can.”
Fundamentally, there is little difference between Europe and Washington’s appetite for war, said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
The United States is “pretty war weary and knows what it feels like to have thousands of soldiers dying in conflict, so it was important for the president to make clear what he’s going to do and what he’s not going to do,” Murphy said. “But I don’t think there’s much separation at all in our bottom lines.”
And elements of NATO deterrence appear to be working. There have been no Russian strikes against the logistics centers on NATO territory that are helping to organize the delivery of military aid to Ukraine, even though destroying the weaponry could advance the Kremlin’s battlefield aims. Nor, at least for now, have there been significant cyberattacks against NATO nations that some policymakers had worried might follow the sanctions imposed on Russia. Alliance leaders say that cyberattacks could trigger NATO’s collective defense treaties, but they haven’t spelled out how.
But skeptics say that Biden has left some doors open for Putin from the outset, including in early December, just as Russian troops were starting to swell along Ukraine’s border, when he said that “the idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not in the cards right now.”
More recently, the administration declined a Polish offer of MiG fighter jets for the Ukrainian military, as Pentagon spokesman John Kirby declared that the U.S. assessment was that Russia would view it as an escalation. And some Eastern European officials say they are worried that there is foot-dragging about bolstering troops and equipment for vulnerable NATO nations.
The Biden administration “just cannot understand that there are times when you have to shut your mouth,” said François Heisbourg, a senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a past adviser to the French defense ministry. “Overall, the crisis has been well-managed, the diplomacy has been superb, and they haven’t really done any stupid stuff. It’s shooting off their mouth about what they won’t do.”
By staying silent about issues such as troop deployments, “you are not signaling that you are going to deploy troops, you are leaving an uncertainty in the mind of your adversary that there is just this chance you are going to deploy troops, but it’s for him to take the chance in escalating,” Heisbourg said.
Republicans have echoed the criticism.
“It’s better for [Russians] to wonder what we’re going to do rather than telling them what we’re going to do, exactly,” said Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. “Generally, strategic ambiguity is the best way.”
At NATO, European diplomats have also raised concerns about the U.S. handling of the public messaging, two senior officials said, though they have done so in the measured tones typical of the consensus-driven alliance. Britain in particular has been vocal, along with Eastern European countries, but other Western European countries share some of the worries, the diplomats said. The diplomats spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed deliberations.
“They’re saying we should stop saying openly, in advance, what NATO will not be doing,” one of the diplomats said.
Biden has not been the only NATO leader to try to be clear about limits.
“We will not give in to the demands for a no-fly zone,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told his country’s parliament on Wednesday. “NATO will not become a party to the war.”
And top Russian officials have admitted that no matter what Biden and other leaders might have outlined in the months leading up to the conflict, the Kremlin was still taken aback by the strength of the Western response.
“No one could have imagined that the West could impose these sanctions. It’s just theft,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Wednesday.
The debate about how to maintain pressure on Russia — while trying to avoid escalating the situation — will continue among leaders in Brussels on Thursday. The Eastern European nations that border Russia — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — have been requesting additional troops and more advanced antiaircraft capabilities, which they say would make clear to the Kremlin that NATO is capable of backing up its warnings with military might. Since 2016, the alliance has maintained about 1,000 rotating troops in each of the four countries, enough to serve as a tripwire, but not enough to defend against a Russian invasion, and the Baltic states could easily be severed from the rest of NATO territory if Russian troops cut off the 40-mile corridor that connects Poland to Lithuania.
After Putin made some miscalculations about Ukraine, to leave NATO’s eastern flank lightly reinforced could risk that he would make the same mistake about alliance territory, said Jonatan Vseviov, the secretary general of the Estonian Foreign Ministry.
“These miscalculations make it at least plausible that he would miscalculate regarding the whole viable reinforcement part as well,” Vseviov said. “That’s end-of-the-world dangerous.”
In the short run, alliance leaders are expected to focus elsewhere, by deploying new troops to Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia — NATO countries that ring Ukraine and the Black Sea and are close to the current fighting.
Biden backers in Washington say that this week’s discussions in Europe should help address whatever splits exist.
“This is exactly why a long, detailed in-person conversation with the heads of state and the chiefs of defense is critical, because we will succeed in deterring Putin only to the extent we are united,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.).
The Washington Post · by Michael Birnbaum, Karoun Demirjian and John Hudson Today at 3:58 p.m. EDT · March 23, 2022
25. Why Russian generals keep getting killed in Ukraine
Why Russian generals keep getting killed in Ukraine
The Russians have lost more general officers than any other military in decades.
BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED MAR 23, 2022 10:18 AM
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Russian generals have a long tradition of leading from the front, dating back to Tsarist times when Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration was fatally wounded at the battle of Borodino in 1812. Two role models for modern-day Russian general officers are Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov, who always placed himself at the most exposed position on the battlefield, and Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who frequently visited the front, said Lester Grau, research director for the Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
But in Ukraine, Russian senior commanders have been forced to operate on the front lines because they don’t trust their subordinates to fight competently and their communications system has broken down, leading to grim results.
For those and other reasons, the Russians have lost more general officers than any other military in decades. So far, there are no indications the Russian military has figured out how to stop the bleeding.
Russian commanders have long operated much further forward and take a more hands-on approach to leadership than their American counterparts, said Charles Bartles, who is also with the Foreign Military Studies Office. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, Zhukov visited the furthest extent of the Soviet lines to get the clearest picture of the situation.
“It is common for Russian senior leaders to surveil the battlefield before engagements,” Bartles told Task & Purpose. “They call it ‘officer’s reconnaissance.’ We would probably call it ‘leader’s reconnaissance.’ Maps and models are fine, but their leaders like to see the territory before they fight in it, as Alfred Korzybski said, ‘the map is not the territory.’”
Another reason why senior commanders may be on the frontlines of the Ukraine war is the Russian military has a very centralized decision-making process, said Rob Lee, a former Marine captain who also spent a year with a defense-focused think tank in Moscow.
“The units are smaller, and so officers have responsibilities that in the U.S. military are done by NCOs [noncommissioned officers],” Lee told Task & Purpose. “They have far more officers in the military than we do. They don’t have a strong NCO corps. As a result, officers make more decisions.”
That also means that Russian soldiers at lower levels of command are delegated less responsibility and they show less initiative than enlisted U.S. service members, Lee said.
For years, the Russian military has attempted to make its service members more professional, but the loss of so many general officers could indicate that those efforts have fallen short, according to a recent report from Khrystyna Holynska and Marek N. Posard of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.
“The death of one general officer in combat is an incredibly rare thing; the death of multiple generals may speak to a need for top officers to be directing field activities in person, a potential sign of a lack of trust down the chain of command,” Holynska and Posard wrote.
These problems may extend to Russia’s officer corps. While the Russian military has plenty of company and field grade officers who should be able to lead frontline troops, for whatever reason, these officers do not seem able to perform at the level required for combat operations, said retired Marine Col. Michael Samarov, who managed a team for planning Russia, Europe, and NATO strategy and policy that advised the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“The Russian army has historically been a low-trust institution,” Samarov told Task & Purpose. “Low trust breeds low performance. Low performance demands increased supervision. Increased supervision further undermines trust and exposes generals.”
It is also likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin is pressuring the commanders of struggling military units to move faster, prompting those commanders to move forward to motivate their troops – and thus exposing them to enemy fire, said Samarov, who was born in Moscow.
On top of all these problems, Russian troops have reportedly been plagued by bad communications equipment, so many Russian soldiers have resorted to using cell phones, which can be intercepted by the Ukrainians, who still control the country’s cellular networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. Not only can the Ukrainians intercept those phone calls, but they can also pinpoint the location of the caller.
Ukraine has also been compounding the Russians’ communications woes by jamming their radio frequencies and blocking phones with Russian prefixes from using its cellular network, said retired Army Gen. David Petraeus.
“Consequently, with no professional noncommissioned corps and without a culture that promotes initiative in junior commissioned officers, more senior officers have to get out of their vehicles and move to the fronts of columns to find out the nature of halts,” Petraeus, who led U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, told Task & Purpose. “And highly skilled, well equipped Ukrainian snipers have taken advantage of the resulting opportunities to identify and target the senior officers, resulting in at least five general officers and many colonels and lieutenant colonels being killed.”
The Russians currently find themselves stuck in a Ukrainian quagmire with no end in sight. It is likely that Russian general officers will continue to die as long as they feel they have to be close enough to the fighting to smell the gunpowder.
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Jeff Schogol is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com, direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
