Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you're killing." - John Paul Vann

“No matter how enmeshed a commander becomes in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account.”

- Sir Winston Churchill

“Machines don't fight wars. People do, and they use their minds.” - Col John R. Boyd

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 17

2. What Russia Got Wrong

3. Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

4. The National Defense Strategy shows the Pentagon’s increased focus on the gray zone. Here’s what that means.

5. Russian disinformation rampant on far-right social media platforms

6. White paper protests end 'zero Covid' and rock China’s balance of power

7. Putin's War - Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War

8. The China-Russia ‘Alliance’: Double the Danger or Limited Partnership?

9. Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

10. China’s Belt and Road comes untracked in SE Europe

11. No clear path to US-China reconciliation

12. The fentanyl wars: China, Mexico and the US

13. Pentagon's New UFO Office: No Aliens But Many Threat Concerns

14. The Multiple Streams Framework and Civil Affairs Operations

15. Biden official told members of Congress that Ukraine has ability to retake Crimea

16. The New Battle for the Arctic

17. Cyber Warfare Is Getting Real

18. “A Spy Among Friends” dramatises the treachery of Kim Philby

19. Do Right by Our Afghan Allies. Pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.

20. Retired top military officials push for bill to help Afghans

21. Flag Letter — #AfghanEvac

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 17

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-17

Key Takeaways

The Kremlin is likely attempting to increase perceptions of Putin’s competence and of that of the Russian Ministry of Defense by publicizing Putin’s meeting with the joint headquarters of the Russian Armed Forces and Putin’s appearances at non-military events.
A New York Times investigation of Russian military documents from early in the war supports ISW’s longstanding assessments about how flawed Russian planning assumptions and campaign design decisions plagued Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from its onset.
Ongoing Russian offensive operations around Bakhmut are further driving a wedge between forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group troops.
The US Central Intelligence Agency assesses that the Kremlin is not serious about negotiations with Ukraine, agreeing with a longstanding ISW assessment.
Ukrainian forces conducted counterattacks near Svatove and Kreminna and continue to strike Russian rear areas.
Russian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and Avdiivka-Donetsk City.
Ukrainian officials warned that Russian forces may be attempting to draw Ukrainian forces into a trap on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
Russia may be conducting an information operation falsely connecting ongoing negotiations on the demilitarization of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to a prospective future Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast.
Several Russian sources denounced a military commissar's claim that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers. An extension of the legal mandatory service period would not be necessary to keep current conscripts in the field, however, as all former conscripts are reservists, and all reservists are already eligible for mobilization.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 17

Dec 17, 2022 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 17

Riley Bailey, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Angela Howard, and Frederick W. Kagan

December 17, 5:30 pm ET

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

The Kremlin is likely attempting to depict Russian President Vladimir Putin as a competent wartime leader and to rehabilitate the image of the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) by publicizing Putin’s meeting with the joint headquarters of the Russian Armed Forces. The Kremlin announced on December 17 that Putin worked at the joint headquarters of the services of the Russian Armed Forces throughout the day, heard reports on the progress of the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, and held a meeting with the joint headquarters and a separate meeting with commanders.[1] The Russian MoD and media published footage of the meeting with the joint headquarters that showed that Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Army General Valery Gerasimov, Russian Defense Minister Army General Sergei Shoigu, and the Commander of the Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine Army General Sergei Surovikin were in attendance.[2] Images and video of the event provided by the Russian MoD preclude the identification of other notable officers (such as military district or army commanders) present, however. The Kremlin likely publicized the meeting to present Putin as being thoroughly engaged with the planning and execution of the war in Ukraine following recent prominent criticism of his role in leading the war effort by figures in the ultra-nationalist pro-war community.[3] One prominent milblogger even questioned whether “Putin finally showed public interest in the special military operation” at their suggestion to do so.[4]

The Kremlin also likely publicized Putin’s meeting with the joint headquarters to rehabilitate the image of the Russian MoD in response to the pro-war community’s routine criticism of the Russian MoD. The Kremlin likely consciously publicized Gerasimov’s, Shoigu’s, and Surovikin’s attendance at the meeting with Putin to present the Russian MoD as an organized, unified, and effective war-fighting institution and to shield the top commanders of the Russian Armed Forces from further criticism. The Russian MoD has taken great care in the past months to affirm Gerasimov’s continued role as Chief of the General Staff for a similar reason- in the absence of tangible Russian victories against Ukraine, Russian military leadership seeks to present a picture of a functional and seamless chain of military command.[5] The Kremlin is likely attempting to rehabilitate the image of the Russian MoD to counterbalance the growing influence of pro-war ultra-nationalist figures, primarily that of Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov and Wagner Group Financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, and their parallel military structures. The Kremlin will likely continue to attempt to shield the Russian MoD from criticism while still facilitating the growing influence of these ultra-nationalist pro-war figures. This effort is unsustainable and will likely continue to generate conflict between the Russian MoD and the ultra-nationalist pro-war community.

The Kremlin likely aims to portray Putin as a leader in touch with the Russian people by publicizing Putin’s participation in meaningless events like the grand opening of a turkey farm. Independent Russian news outlet The Moscow Times reported that the Kremlin has instructed leaders of certain state-owned corporations and regional governors to prepare a “positive agenda” of news and events in which Putin can participate.[6] The Moscow Times noted that Putin’s calendar already includes small events, such as the grand opening of a turkey breeding center, commemorating the anniversaries of state corporations, and reopening a repaired highway.[7] The Moscow Times cited Kremlin officials who said that the social well-being of the Russian people is declining while war fatigue is growing and that Putin needs to be seen as a “herald of good news.”[8] Such efforts likely aim to remind the Russian people that Putin is not just a military leader in wartime but also a civilian leader with close ties to the people. However, amplifying pithy events while canceling opportunities for the public to meaningfully engage with Putin on the state of the war and the country will not likely meaningfully improve Putin’s image, and, as ISW previously assessed, may undermine Putin’s populist appeal.[9] Russian pro-war nationalists have recently criticized the Russian MoD for similar performative messaging that ignores Russia‘s wartime realities by branding the MoD with the epithet “Russian Ministry of Camouflage Selfies,” as ISW has previously reported.[10]

A New York Times (NYT) investigation of Russian military documents supports ISW’s longstanding assessments about how flawed Russian planning assumptions and campaign design decisions plagued Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from its onset. ISW has long assessed that faulty Russian planning assumptions, campaign design decisions, and Russian violations of Russia’s own military doctrine undermined Russian operations. The NYT acquired and published logbooks, timetables, orders, and other documents of elements of the 76th Airborne Division and 1st Guards Tank Army related to the early days of the war on December 16.[11] The documents demonstrate that Russian military planners expected Russian units to be able to capture significant Ukrainian territory with little to no Ukrainian military opposition. The documents indicate that elements of the 76th Airborne Division and Eastern Military District were ordered to depart Belarus and reach Kyiv within 18 hours against little resistance; Russian planners placed OMON riot police and SOBR Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia) special police elements (essentially a Russian SWAT equivalent) within the first column of a maneuver element of the 104th Air Assault Regiment of the 76th Airborne Division.[12] Riot police are not suitable lead elements for a large maneuver force in a conventional force-on-force war because they are not trained to conduct combined arms or mechanized warfare. The decision to place riot police in the lead column is a violation of Russian (or any normal) doctrine and indicates that Russian planners did not expect significant organized Ukrainian resistance. A separate set of orders indicates that Russian planners expected unsupported elements of the Russian 26th Tank Regiment (of the 47th Tank Division, 1st Guards Tank Army) to conduct a mostly uninhibited, 24-hour dash from Ukraine’s border with Russia to a point across the Dnipro River, about 400 kilometers away.[13] Ukrainian forces destroyed elements of the 26th Tank Regiment in Kharkiv Oblast, hundreds of kilometers short of its intended destination on March 17.[14]

The NYT investigation also supports ISW’s assessments that Russian strategic commanders have been micromanaging operational commanders' decisions on tactical matters and that Russian morale is very low. The investigation supported existing reporting that Russian soldiers in Belarus did not know they were going to attack Ukraine until February 23—the day before the invasion—and that some soldiers did not know about the invasion until one hour before the invasion began.[15] A retired Russian general told the NYT that the lack of a unified Russian theater command meant there was “no unified planning of actions and command [and control].”[16] A Ukrainian pilot told the NYT he was amazed that Russian forces did not conduct a proper air and missile campaign at the beginning of the war to target Ukrainian airfields—as Russian doctrine prescribes. The NYT reported a Russian tank commander deliberately destroyed a Rosgvardia checkpoint in Zaporizhia Oblast over an argument and that many Russian soldiers sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid combat.[17] The NYT's findings support ISW’s assessments and body of research on why the Russian military has been experiencing significant failures since the beginning of the invasion.

Ongoing Russian offensive operations around Bakhmut are further driving a wedge between forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group troops. DNR Head Denis Pushilin claimed on December 17 that both DNR and Wagner units are closing the “pincers” on Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut.[18] Several milbloggers responded to Pushilin’s claim and categorically denied that DNR troops have anything to do with fighting in Bakhmut, emphasizing that offensive efforts in this area are exclusively led by the Wagner Group.[19] The disparities between Pushilin’s claims, which represent the official DNR line, and statements made by Prigozhin and other prominent voices in the Russian information space suggest that there is a continued and growing divide between the DNR and the Wagner Group. During battles for settlements south of Bakhmut in October, Prigozhin denied any involvement by DNR or conventional Russian troops in the capture of Ivanhrad.[20] Prigozhin has also previously been remarkably clear-eyed about the slow and grinding pace of Wagner advances in the Bakhmut area, which directly contrasts with exaggerated claims made by Pushilin and other Russian sources.[21] Wagner’s role in operations around Bakhmut will likely continue to contribute to divides between various factions in the Russian military and discredit DNR authorities and the forces that they command.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assesses that the Kremlin is not serious about negotiations with Ukraine, agreeing with a longstanding ISW assessment. CIA Director William Burns told PBS NewsHour on December 16, “Most conflicts end in negotiations, but that requires a seriousness on the part of the Russians in this instance that I don't think we see... it's not our assessment that the Russians are serious at this point about a real negotiation.”[22] ISW has consistently assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in negotiating seriously with Ukraine and retains maximalist objectives for the war.[23]

Putin has consistently weaponized invocations of the negotiation process to isolate Ukraine from partner support. Putin has routinely framed Ukraine as refusing concessions and likely seeks to use any ceasefire and negotiation window to allow Russian troops time to reconstitute and relaunch operations, thus depriving Ukraine of the initiative. A ceasefire agreement that occurs soon enough to allow Russian forces to rest and refit this winter is extremely unlikely. Russia and Ukraine are currently opposed to one another on the terms of any such agreement, and it is highly unlikely that Russian and Ukrainian officials will agree to a ceasefire, let alone implement one, for some months. Russian forces will likely not have the opportunity to pause Ukrainian winter counter-offensives and reset before spring.

Key Takeaways

The Kremlin is likely attempting to increase perceptions of Putin’s competence and of that of the Russian Ministry of Defense by publicizing Putin’s meeting with the joint headquarters of the Russian Armed Forces and Putin’s appearances at non-military events.
A New York Times investigation of Russian military documents from early in the war supports ISW’s longstanding assessments about how flawed Russian planning assumptions and campaign design decisions plagued Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from its onset.
Ongoing Russian offensive operations around Bakhmut are further driving a wedge between forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group troops.
The US Central Intelligence Agency assesses that the Kremlin is not serious about negotiations with Ukraine, agreeing with a longstanding ISW assessment.
Ukrainian forces conducted counterattacks near Svatove and Kreminna and continue to strike Russian rear areas.
Russian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and Avdiivka-Donetsk City.
Ukrainian officials warned that Russian forces may be attempting to draw Ukrainian forces into a trap on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
Russia may be conducting an information operation falsely connecting ongoing negotiations on the demilitarization of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to a prospective future Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast.
Several Russian sources denounced a military commissar's claim that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers. An extension of the legal mandatory service period would not be necessary to keep current conscripts in the field, however, as all former conscripts are reservists, and all reservists are already eligible for mobilization.

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

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

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

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued counter-offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line on December 17. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted assaults in the direction of Sofiivka, Luhansk Oblast (21km northwest of Svatove).[24] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Ukrainian forces are advancing near Svatove and that the Svatove area is currently one of the most active sections of the front.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted assaults in the direction of Russian positions near Terny, Donetsk Oblast (17km northwest of Kreminna) and Nevske, Luhansk Oblast (18km northwest of Kreminna).[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces also conducted an assault in the direction of Holykove (10km north of Kreminna) in order to gain control of the R-66 highway (Svatove-Kreminna highway) and push Russian forces across the Krasna River.[27] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Ukrainian forces are also advancing near Kreminna.[28] Russian troops conducted limited counterattacks to regain lost positions near Kreminna. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Ploshchanka (17km northwest of Kreminna), Chervonopopivka (6km northwest of Kreminna) and Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna).[29]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued to strike Russian rear areas in Luhansk Oblast on December 17. Russian and social media sources claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Russian rears areas in Lantrativka (57km northeast of Svatove), Shchastia (78km southeast of Kreminna), and Kadiivka (60km southeast of Kreminna).[30]

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian assaults on Bakhmut itself, northeast of Bakhmut near Zelenopillya (4km northeast of Bakhmut), and south of Bakhmut near Opytne (3km south of Bakhmut) and Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut).[31] Geolocated footage shows Ukrainian troops shelling Russian positions northeast of Bakhmut between Soledar (10km northeast of Bakhmut) and Bakhmutske (9km northeast of Bakhmut), indicating Russian forces have advanced in this area.[32] Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov posted footage reportedly of Chechen “Akhmat” special forces and elements of the Luhansk People’s Republic 2nd Army Corps firing at Ukrainian positions in Soledar.[33] A Ukrainian volunteer serviceman reported that Wagner Group forces in Opytne are being reinforced either by fresh Wagner Group troops or conventional Russian servicemen, potentially marine detachments from the Vuhledar area.[34] A Russian milblogger reported that small arms exchanges are ongoing in Opytne and that Ukrainian troops are actively counterattacking south of Bakhmut near Kurdiumivka and Ozarianivka.[35] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian counterattacks northeast and south of Bakhmut.[36] Multiple Russian sources circulated footage of Ukrainian trenches in Bakhmut’s city center, suggesting that this indicates Ukrainian troops are preparing for urban combat defense.[37]

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the western outskirts of Donetsk City on December 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attacked near Marinka, Pobieda, and Novomykhailivka, all near the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City.[38] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces attacked towards Vodiane, Pervomaiske, and Nevelske (all on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) and that fighting is ongoing in the Marinka city center.[39] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian troops destroyed two Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Novomayorske and Shevchenko, about 50km southwest of Donetsk City.[40] The Ukrainian National Guard reported that national guardsmen successfully repelled a Russian attack near Velyka Novoselivka, about 70km southwest of Donetsk City and about 15km east of the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border.[41] Russian forces continued routine artillery fire along the line of contact in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area, in western Donetsk Oblast, and in eastern Zaporizhia Oblast.[42]

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

Ukrainian officials warned that Russian forces may be attempting to draw Ukrainian forces into a trap on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that unspecified Russian elements withdrew from Kakhovka and Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast to Nyzhni Sirohozy (at the T2209 and T2208 junction 50km southeast of the east bank of the Dnipro River) and that Russian forces have been telling locals that they will fully withdraw from the Kakhovka area by the new year.[43] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Natalya Humenyuk stated that Ukrainian officials are verifying this information because Russian forces could be attempting to lure Ukrainian forces into a trap on the east bank of the Dnipro River.[44] It is very unlikely that Russian forces would be able to fake a withdrawal without Ukrainian forces detecting the deception.

Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian rear areas in southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian strikes against Russian force concentrations in Tokmak and Polohy, Zaporizhia Oblast wounded over 100 Russian military personnel and destroyed an ammunition depot on December 15.[45] A Ukrainian source reported explosions in Zalizynyi Port (along the Black Sea coastline in southwestern Kherson Oblast, 40km south of the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River) on December 17.[46]

Russian forces continued artillery, rocket, and missile strikes against areas in southern Ukraine on December 17. Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces continued to conduct rocket and artillery strikes against frontline areas in Zaporizhia Oblast west of Hulyaipole.[47] Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces shelled Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[48] Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces shelled Kherson City and its environs on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River.[49] Odesa Oblast Military Administration Spokesperson Serhiy Bratchuk stated that Ukrainian air defenses intercepted two Russian Onyx missiles that were heading towards Odesa Oblast on December 17.[50]

Russia may be conducting a new information operation falsely connecting ongoing negotiations regarding the demilitarization of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) with a prospective future Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast. A Russian milblogger claimed on December 17 that Ukraine seeks to force Russia to demilitarize the ZNPP using diplomatic means in order to reduce Russian forces’ ability to defend against a prospective Ukrainian counteroffensive towards Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[51] Russian milbloggers have previously misconstrued diplomatic efforts as attempts to handicap Russian forces at the ZNPP and claimed that French President Emmanuel Macron stated that both sides had reached a deal on the removal of heavy and light weapons from the ZNPP, when Macron only specified heavy weapons.[52] Such an information operation likely intends to undermine the ongoing negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency to establish a security zone around the ZNPP as well as Ukraine’s status as the legitimate operator of the ZNPP.

Note: ISW will report on activities in Kherson Oblast as part of the Southern Axis in this and subsequent updates. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in right-bank Kherson Oblast has accomplished its stated objectives, so ISW will not present a Southern Ukraine counteroffensive section until Ukrainian forces resume counteroffensives in southern Ukraine.

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

Several Russian sources denounced a Moscow Oblast military commissar's claim that Russian authorities will extend the service period for conscript soldiers from 12 months to 18 for spring 2023 conscripts and two years for fall 2023 conscripts on December 17.[53] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reiterated that Russian law establishes conscripts’ period of service as 12 months and stated that there are no proposed changes to the current law but did not directly acknowledge the origin of the claim.[54] A Russian-government-aligned Telegram channel that denounces “fake” news stories noted that extending the general term for Russian conscripts would require the State Duma to amend federal law and gain approval from the Russian Federation Council and President Vladimir Putin.[55] Any legal attempt to extend the general term of service for conscripts would be both extremely unpopular with Russian domestic audiences—even those who support the war—but is also unnecessary if the Kremlin desires to keep conscripts fighting beyond their mandatory service periods. Russian law designates former conscripts as reservists following their term of conscript service, and all reservists are eligible for immediate mobilization under current Russian law.

The combination of war and sanctions seems to be starting to generate considerable dislocation of the Russian labor market. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin adopted temporary measures attempting to mitigate the impact of the war and Western sanctions on the Russian labor market on December 17.[56] A prominent Russian news outlet claimed that these measures partially reimburse employers for creating temporary jobs for citizens at risk of dismissal, organize paid public work projects, and provide for vocational training for industrial enterprise employees at risk of dismissal.[57] The outlet anticipated over 176,000 Russians will use these measures in 2023.[58] ISW has previously reported major Russian labor shortages due to the mobilization of a significant portion of the Russian workforce.[59] The combination of Russian measures to address layoffs and ongoing labor shortages suggests that Russia struggles to support a balanced distribution of labor across industries, facing a shortage in some areas and a surplus in areas that now lack support capacity.

Russian authorities continue efforts to use civilian donations and mandated contributions to finance the war despite common civilian financial hurdles. “Just Russia” Party Leader Sergei Mironov called for the Russian government to begin issuing federal war bonds at an interest rate of 2%.[60] An opposition Russian news source reported on December 16 that at least two factories of a mineral processing company in Rostov Oblast have withheld 3-5% of workers’ wages for ”donations” to the war effort without worker consent since October or December.[61] Another source reported that Russian Pension Fund employees at a single Novosibirsk branch “voluntarily” contributed 18 million rubles (about 277,457 USD) to support military needs.[62] Novosibirsk Oblast Legislative Assembly Deputy Aleksandr Terepa announced that contributions are completely voluntary and claimed authorities have no need to mandate contributions since all workers are so eager to donate.[63] However, ISW has extensively reported on the coercion of Russian workers to “volunteer” for partial salary diversions in support of the war effort in addition to resident-led drives to equip Russian soldiers.[64]

Russian forces continue attempts to discourage desertion through threats of punishment. An open-source intelligence aggregator posted an intercepted call on December 17 in which a Russian wife warns her soldier husband that Russian authorities gather Russian soldiers who lay down their weapons and deploy them straight to the frontlines.[65] A Russian Telegram channel reported on December 16 that the Lugacom mobile service provider continues to send customers in Luhansk Oblast messages threatening that leaving military positions is criminally punishable desertion.[66] A Russian news outlet claimed that Russian authorities in Murmansk, Veliky Novgorod, and Solnechnogorsk handed down the first three sentences under Russian articles on desertion and unauthorized abandonment of a unit during mobilization on December 16.[67] However, Russian authorities appear hesitant to punish deserters through legal channels despite creating conditions so to do. The Russian opposition news source reported that judges waived two of the three sentences and that the third sentence remains unknown.[68]

Western sources continue to confirm that Russian units that were widely considered to be elite prior to the extension of the war in February have suffered significant losses in Ukraine. The Washington Post reported on December 16 the 200th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (of the 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command) sustained devastating casualties as one of the first Russian units to assault Kharkiv City in the early phases of the war and was destroyed.[69] The Washington Post noted that “endemic corruption, strategic miscalculations,” and “Kremlin failure to grasp the true capabilities of its own military or those of its adversary” turned the 200th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade into a weak, demoralized unit artificially inflated with inexperienced conscripts.[70] This situation resembles the depleted state of the broader Russian forces and severely limits Russian combat capability, as ISW has previously reported.[71]

Russian authorities continue to struggle to monitor mobilized soldiers. A Russian opposition news source reported on December 16 that Moscow police apprehended a mobilized soldier from Nizhny Novgorod walking through the Moscow metro carrying weapons he received in October.[72] The soldier reportedly left his position due to hospitalization but kept his weapons with him afterward.[73] Another Russian source reported on December 16 that authorities discovered a mobilized soldier dead in his tent from undetermined causes at the Sergievsky Training Ground, Sverdlovsk Oblast.[74]

Russian forces appear to be facing logistical hurdles in an effort to gather military equipment in Mariupol due to personnel inefficiency and incompetence. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported on December 17 that Russian border guards created artificial problems leading to traffic jams with a large amount of military equipment moving from Russia to Mariupol toward Zaporizhia Oblast.[75] Russian forces in Mariupol also blocked traffic for hours while unsuccessfully attempting to navigate a Buk air defense missile system under a low railway bridge.[76] Andryushchenko added that Russia forces transport dragon’s teeth fortifications by “continuous caravan” on trucks likely from Stavropol Krai, over 500km from Mariupol.[77] Russian attempts to export dragon’s teeth over such a great distance would represent a major logistical challenge and resource commitment to the project.[78]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian forces continue to rely on civilian labor in Russian-occupied territories to construct defensive fortifications in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported on December 17 that Russian forces and occupation officials have posted employment ads for civilians to construct defensive structures in Berdyansk Raion, Zaporizhia Oblast.[79] Andryushchenko reported that Russian forces previously used similar employment programs to force civilian workers from the Mariupol Ilyich Metallurgical Plant to build fortifications in Kherson Oblast in poor conditions without pay.[80] ISW has previously assessed that Russian occupation officials have mobilized residents in order to force them into constructing defensive fortifications.[81]

Russian occupation officials are likely continuing to try to integrate Chechen elements into occupation administrations. A Russian milblogger posted an image on December 16 showing a propaganda billboard at the Mariupol Ilyich Metallurgical Plant that depicts Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Denis Pushilin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov.[82] The Donetsk Oblast occupation administration’s inclusion of Kadyrov in its propaganda supports ISW’s previous assessment that Russian occupation officials are likely seeking to integrate Chechen officials into their occupation structures.[83]

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

[1] http://www.kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70098

[6] https://www.moscowtimes dot io/2022/12/16/kreml-poruchil-goskorporatsiyam-zapustit-konveier-pozitivnih-novostei-pro-putina-a28893

[7] https://www.moscowtimes dot io/2022/12/16/kreml-poruchil-goskorporatsiyam-zapustit-konveier-pozitivnih-novostei-pro-putina-a28893

[8] https://www.moscowtimes dot io/2022/12/16/kreml-poruchil-goskorporatsiyam-zapustit-konveier-pozitivnih-novostei-pro-putina-a28893

[14] https://en.interfax.com dot ua/news/general/815264.html; https://www.unian.net/war/vsu-pokazali-video-unichtozheniya-tankovogo-po...

[18] https://t.me/brussinf/5384; https://dnr-news dot ru/society/2022/12/17/187004.html

[44] https://suspilne dot media/340676-informacia-pro-vidvid-vijsk-rf-z-kahovki-i-novoi-kahovki-moze-buti-castinou-gibridnoi-vijni-gumenuk/

[53] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/12/17/podmoskovnyy-voenkom-zayavil-o-vozvraschenii-k-dvuhletnemu-sroku-sluzhby-po-prizyvu-minoborony-rf-eto-otritsaet; https://t.me/warfakes/10016; https://t.me/milinfolive/94488; https://t...

[67] https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-dec-15-16; https://t.me/mediazzzo... media/news/2022/12/16/tri_prigovora

[68] https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-dec-15-16; https://t.me/mediazzzo... media/news/2022/12/16/tri_prigovora

understandingwar.org

2. What Russia Got Wrong

Excerpts:

Telling the inside history of an ongoing war is an ambitious goal. How did you all pursue this story?

It was a very intense reporting effort. I was trying to get beyond what we already know about Putin and get to some of the nuances surrounding him and his decision to go to war. It is really hard, because it’s something that so few people know for sure. It took a long time and a lot of conversations.

I spoke on the record to two rich Russians, one who turned against Putin and another who didn’t. It was fascinating to see how people made their decisions. There were a good amount of people who were willing to speak publicly. Often these people were prepared to talk because they want their side of the story out there.

What Russia Got Wrong

A cascade of military failures started with Vladimir Putin.

nytimes.com · by Claire Moses · December 18, 2022

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader.Credit...Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

Nearly 10 months into its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has suffered great losses. Its military has faltered against a foe that, before the war, appeared much weaker. A team of Times journalists published an account this weekend of how Russia so badly mismanaged its invasion, based on interviews, intercepted phone calls, documents and secret battle plans. At the center of it is Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who has been in power for more than two decades.

I spoke to Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief and one of the lead reporters on the story, about how Putin came to decide to go to war.

Claire: When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, experts believed that Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine. That didn’t happen. What is the main reason that the war went so badly for Russia?

Anton: It was a cascade of failures, and at the top is Putin’s own misguidedness, his own isolation and his own conviction that he knew what was best. The Russian military was unprepared all the way down to a tactical level, like using Soviet-era maps. Like using their cellphones to call home, which gave away their positions and allowed them to be ambushed or attacked. There wasn’t enough food to feed the soldiers.

We got hold of actual copies of some of the invasion plans that some of the Russian military units had, which showed them expecting to race toward Kyiv within hours of invading. Russian military leaders didn’t think they’d need any reinforcements.

I talked to many people who knew Putin personally, and they told me that the decision to go to war was based on his gut feeling. Putin didn’t seem to think he needed advice on the wisdom of this invasion. Putin was convinced that he knew best, that he understood Ukraine and its place in history as well as his own.

You report in the story that, partly because of the pandemic, Putin didn’t meet face to face with a Western leader for more than a year. How did that affect his decision to go to war?

We don’t have perfect insight into what’s going on inside Putin’s inner circle; it’s still one of the world’s most secretive ruling establishments. But everyone I talked to said they didn’t believe that Putin had a single meeting before the invasion where people talked openly about the wisdom of going to war. Putin doesn’t like group discussions, he likes one-on-one discussions.

One person I spoke to compared it to a social media algorithm. Putin’s aides and friends would see what got a rise out of him emotionally, and they’d bring him information that further intensified his views.

Why were the predictions about the war so wrong?

It’s because this war was something that nobody could really imagine. It wasn’t just Putin who miscalculated. The Russian elite largely thought there’d be no way that Putin would actually go to war. Many Ukrainians also didn’t think Putin was actually going to invade, nor did the Europeans. The U.S. did expect Russia to invade, but thought it could win in days. The war was so different from anything that has happened in recent decades that it was impossible to make informed predictions.

There was a ton of miscalculation from all sides. Putin also didn’t expect the West to unite behind Ukraine the way it did, nor does he appear to have expected Europe to reorient away from Russian fossil fuels so quickly.

We’ve talked a lot about what went wrong for Russia, and of course the war isn’t over. Is there anything that is going well?

Putin recognizes that things haven’t gone to plan, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to fold. He is willing to accept a lot of casualties — up to 300,000, according to what one NATO member is now telling allies. The way Putin looks at it is that the Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II, and he’s convinced that the Russian people are prepared to suffer — more than people in the West.

Something else that has gone well from the Kremlin’s point of view is the country’s propaganda machine. It helped convince many Russians that the war was not going disastrously wrong, and that it was the West that was forcing Russia to fight. In addition, sanctions haven’t derailed the Russian economy the way the West had hoped, and much of the world hasn’t turned its back on Russia they way some expected.

Telling the inside history of an ongoing war is an ambitious goal. How did you all pursue this story?

It was a very intense reporting effort. I was trying to get beyond what we already know about Putin and get to some of the nuances surrounding him and his decision to go to war. It is really hard, because it’s something that so few people know for sure. It took a long time and a lot of conversations.

I spoke on the record to two rich Russians, one who turned against Putin and another who didn’t. It was fascinating to see how people made their decisions. There were a good amount of people who were willing to speak publicly. Often these people were prepared to talk because they want their side of the story out there.

Anton Troianovski is The Times’s Moscow bureau chief. His first journalism job was as a photographer with local papers in the St. Louis area, where he grew up, and he first reported in Russia as an intern for The Associated Press in 2006.

3. Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

Wishful thinking?

But if it comes to pass, what comes next? Are we ready?

Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

ENDGAME

The war in Ukraine has destroyed Putin’s aura of infallibility back home, and even the Kremlin seems to have realized this is the beginning of the end.

Anna Nemtsova

Updated Dec. 18, 2022 2:32AM ET / Published Dec. 17, 2022 8:03PM ET

The Daily Beast · December 18, 2022

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

More than two decades after he came to power, President Putin’s grip on the Russian people is finally starting to falter.

The war in Ukraine has opened up a credibility gap, and for the first time many Russians no longer feel they can trust what their leader is saying to them. Combined with tough economic sanctions, funds being re-allocated to the war, and conscription drives across the country, the costs of this vainglorious conquest are becoming more and more difficult to take.

Even loyal Russians have plenty of questions for Putin right now. And the Kremlin is running out of ways to cope with the pressure. In the past, a scripted appearance, or a half-naked staged photoshoot would be enough to get the domestic media back on side. Sometimes, they even gave independent reporters a chance to ask Putin one or two sensitive questions—which he would quickly and vigorously dismiss.

But every recent attempt to make Putin look like a strong and decisive leader has failed so badly—even inside Russia—that after nine months of devastating war in Ukraine, the Kremlin is running out of ideas. They even canceled Putin’s big annual press conference for the first time in years.

“Putin could have ruled longer, if he did not start this war but now his days are really numbered”

— Yulia Galiamina

“Russia, just like any other nation, wants to live a stable life without feeling ashamed of our Moscow leadership. Before the war Putin guaranteed us a stable life but now he tells us that life in Russia will be good only in ten years,” Vera Aleksandrovna, 57, a lawyer from Saint Petersburg, told The Daily Beast. “I liked Putin before the war, my son was an IT tech, we liked the IT opportunities in Russia; but now all the brain and talent is escaping the country, my son is gone too and I cannot afford to wait for ten more years for a good life.”

Putin’s rock-solid system is crumbling.

Russian chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin, told The Daily Beast that we are already entering the endgame for Putin. “Russia has obviously lost the war, which will lead to the collapse of the regime but the question is how many more people will die before that happens,” he told The Daily Beast.

“Putin has never played chess, the game of rules, he played a poker game,” Kasparov said. “Putin is absolute evil, he has gone insane after 22 years in power; but in his bones he must understand that he cannot go on ruling Russia, when the war ends and dozens of thousands of angry soldiers return home with arms, feeling robbed.”

Tatiana Yashina, 62, the mother of jailed opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said the last week has seen a turning point in Putin’s regime.

“Putin is falling apart,” she told The Daily Beast. “He is clearly lying right in front of the cameras—with no confidence in his voice.”

Yashina had particular reason to pay attention to Putin’s state of mind because her son was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison last Friday, but the way the president has handled the fallout of his unpopular incarceration—for telling the truth about the war in Ukraine—has broken through to the wider population.

Veteran Kremlin pool reporter Andrei Kolesnikov confronted Putin over Yashin’s “beastly” sentence in a video that went viral. Yashina said: “Shaky Putin… lied that he did not know my son, then he lied that he did not know anything about the sentence.”

Putin’s contortions are no longer convincing his domestic audience.

Hundreds of independent Russian and foreign journalists have left Russia during the past nine months but some of those remaining, including BBC journalists, continue to spread the word about a commander-in-chief who is losing thousands of his soldiers, as well as some of the key territories in Ukraine. Last week BBC’s Russian service and the local publication, Mediazona, confirmed the names of 10,002 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. The real Russian death toll “may exceed 20,000 and the total number of irretrievable losses could be as high as 90,000,” the BBC said.

Both independent and Kremlin-controlled polls show that Putin has lost support for his war, with less than 30 percent of the country wanting it to continue. “Putin could have ruled longer, if he did not start this war but now his days are really numbered, he is falling apart and he is clearly aware of it,” Yulia Galiamina, a Moscow-based opposition politician, told The Daily Beast. Galiamina has been a victim of police violence, and has been under arrest multiple times but she refuses to leave Russia, instead she is encouraging more people to stand up against Putin.

Galiamina leads a movement of more than 150 Russian women called Soft Power. “Most of our women are mothers, who see the problems from the point of view of our children’s future without Putin, in Russia, that is eventually going to be free.” Galiamina and Soft Power activists have been collecting signatures of people speaking against Putin’s mobilization of Russians. “We have collected more than 500,000 signatures that we are going to send to the Kremlin, we understand our collective responsibility,” she added.

“This is a dead end, his plan has failed in Ukraine”

— Olga Bychkova

Putin is still backed by around 79 percent of Russians according to recent polls but that faith is weakening. Studies by Levada, an independent Russian think tank, show the number of Russians who believe their country is moving in the right direction has already decreased from 64 percent in October to 61 percent in November.

Every Kremlin attempt to rebuild the image of Putin as superman seems to provoke another avalanche of jokes online.

Putin recorded one of his on-location Action Man clips earlier this month showing him driving over the bomb-damaged bridge to Crimea. It was supposed to show how fit and healthy he still is at the age of 70 but online commenters were more obsessed with the car he was driving. It was not one of the Russian-made Ladas he has previously promoted—which motorists curse for “breaking down more often than even the cheapest foreign brands”—but a German-engineered Mercedes.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was forced to go on the record explaining that the Mercedes just happened to be on hand, and it was no indication of Putin’s vehicular preferences.

More damagingly, his jaunt into internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, now annexed by Russia, came in the same week that three explosions struck strategic airfields inside the motherland, one of them just 150 miles from Moscow. The drone attacks made Russian air defenses and the commander-in-chief look pathetic, even in the domestic media.

Last week, the Kremlin published an image of Putin with a glass of champagne in his hand, and that immediately gave rise to many anecdotes about “drunk Putin.”

The prevailing mood is becoming very hard for the Kremlin to navigate.

“The Kremlin canceling Putin’s big press conference is a sign: they realize how hopeless their situation is—this is a dead end, his plan has failed in Ukraine,” well-known Kremlin observer Olga Bychkova told The Daily Beast. “They are still standing by him, since without Putin they are finished; but now they are even unable to write a script, think of questions and answers for him.”

The latest debate between Putin’s critics is whether the catastrophe in Ukraine is the fault of one man or all of Russian society. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch turned prisoner now exiled in London, suggested to Radio Liberty last week that—while Putin took the whole country with him during the annexation of Crimea in 2014—he is now on his own. “The war of 2020 is purely Putin’s invention; Russian society had a shock on Feb. 23,” he said.

The question now is how much worse is the situation going to get?

Kasparov, an ally of Khodorkovsky, thinks there is now also an opportunity for the U.S. to drive a wedge between the president and his senior lieutenants, like Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Kremlin’s security council. He says the U.S. must spell out what would happen if they did ever allow Putin to press the nuclear button. Kasparov said he hoped CIA director William Burns “whispered something into Patrushev’s ear,” at the meeting between the security chiefs in Moscow last month.

After years of adulation across the country, Putin is becoming more isolated by the day.

The Daily Beast · December 18, 2022

4. The National Defense Strategy shows the Pentagon’s increased focus on the gray zone. Here’s what that means.

By Gray Zone Task Force experts

Some useful analysis.

I am out of the loop. The only expert I recognize is Marc Polymeropoulos.

The others (bios linked in the article):

Julia Siegel

Arun Iyer

Jennifer A. Counter

Robert J. Giesler

David Fogel

Thomas Ferguson

The National Defense Strategy shows the Pentagon’s increased focus on the gray zone. Here’s what that means.

By Gray Zone Task Force experts

atlanticcouncil.org · by Katherine Walla · December 13, 2022

The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) marks a change in the Pentagon’s tone in several ways, but the most distinctive change may be the emphasis on operating in the gray zone—which was entirely absent from the 2018 summary. With the publication of the 2022 strategy, the Department of Defense (DOD) is officially recognizing that the escalation of competitors’ coercive and malign activities in the gray zone present a challenge to US security; it also calls for campaigning across all spectrums of conflict, pushing the department to make a deliberate effort to coordinate its activities and investments across various theaters and domains. Our experts from the Gray Zone Task Force within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Forward Defense practice, which aims to develop an integrated strategic framework for US operations in the gray zone, map out what this new focus means for the US defense industry in the coming years.

1. What exactly does the Pentagon mean by activities in the gray zone?

The NDS defines gray zone methods as “coercive approaches that may fall below perceived thresholds for US military action and across areas of responsibility of different parts of the US government.” That definition acknowledges that strategic competitors are increasingly taking the fight off the physical battlefield and using unconventional and nonmilitary means to undermine US and allied security. Adversaries such as China and Russia are not solely—or even primarily—targeting military assets, but rather they are fueling societal and cultural fissures, shaping the information domain, and disrupting economic markets and trade. This is not a new concept: China’s and Russia’s use of nonmilitary means of warfare dates back to Operation Desert Storm, wherein the United States walked away celebrating a decisive battlefield victory while US adversaries began visualizing a future fight in which they could compensate for unparalleled US conventional power through hybrid means.

The DOD’s definition of gray zone activities can be interpreted as purposefully broad, implying that a discussion of modern warfare today is incomplete without discussing threats permeating from the gray zone. However, it is notable that the NDS opted to characterize only competitor or adversary methods as falling within the gray zone, even while mentioning comparable US and allied capabilities and approaches.

Overall, this NDS’s definition of gray zone methods broadens the US defense community’s understanding of who is being targeted in the gray zone and thus who should be implicated in the DOD’s response—and more significant than the definition itself is the prioritization placed on the gray zone. However, this is only one step in the right direction, as different US agencies and departments are currently working under different understandings of what does and does not fall within the gray zone. This lack of consensus or coordination, coupled with an overall lack of direction as to whether and how the United States should fight in the gray zone, hinders an effective whole-of-nation response to a whole-of-nation problem.

—Julia Siegel is an assistant director with the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense practice.

2. How do gray zone activities fit into the DOD’s integrated deterrence concept?

Integrated deterrence is, at its heart, about shaping behavior to “convince potential adversaries that the costs of their hostile activities far outweigh any possible benefits,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained. Integrated deterrence ultimately relies on a full spectrum of incentives, disincentives, messaging, and negotiation, underwritten by credible deterrents of conventional and/or strategic military action. Unsurprisingly, a good amount of the spectrum below the threshold of active armed conflict will reside in the gray zone.

The United States must react to adversarial activity in the gray zone, especially in areas that adversaries perceive as important, to reduce their efficacy; that will require responses that are appropriate, proportionate, and effective. Equally important, the United States must engage proactively in the gray zone to shape competitors’ behavior. Some of the capabilities needed for engaging in the gray zone exist within the DOD, with many housed within US Special Operations Forces core activities, as well as theater security cooperation activities and those at a national level that transcend a single geographic combatant command such as coordination with Five Eyes partners (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) across the globe. Other capabilities, while not organic to the department, are at its disposal through effective partnerships with the intelligence community, other departments (e.g. State, Treasury, and Commerce), and alliances and partnerships. Improving the way the DOD leverages partnerships can potentially result in better outcomes than replicating the partners’ capabilities.

A critical part of integrated deterrence will be how the United States articulates its so-called “red lines,” or adversarial actions that trigger a US military response. In order to effectively shape behavior that supports US and allied interests, US strategy and execution must erase any doubt that such limits and consequences do exist, while simultaneously reducing adversary confidence about their knowledge of precisely where those red lines lie. That deliberate ambiguity keeps adversaries from thinking that everything up to the red line would be “fair game,” and avoids inviting lower-level malign activity. It also avoids the optics of a United States’ “bluff” being called, in part, to avoid walking back on pronounced lines. Lastly, engaging in the gray zone will buy the maneuver time and space required to maintain its competitive edge and deter aggression in the future—the United States cannot waste this advantage with denial, handwringing, and partisanship—especially when it comes to China.

—Arun Iyer is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense practice and leads its project Adding Color to the Gray Zone.

3. The NDS differentiates between China as the pacing threat and Russia as an acute threat. What does that look like in the gray zone?

The NDS correctly notes that China and Russia pose unique challenges to the United States. The two countries differ in how they impact the United States and in how long their threats last. China’s advances in technology, access to third-country governments and resources, and role as a key global manufacturer means that the United States and allied countries face a strategic, long-term competition against China. All-out war against China would devastate the global economy and cripple US-owned multinational businesses. In contrast, Russia lacks the reach of its Soviet Union days and its impacts on global markets are mostly limited to petrochemicals. As highlighted in its efforts in Ukraine, the Russian military’s decline has been noticed in the waning professionalism of its forces, reliability of material, and overall investment and research and development. Russia would struggle to project traditional military power much outside its border areas.

China, despite recent economic troubles, is a nation on the rise and one that feels it deserves a place at the top of the world order. Although its population is forecasted to decline in the coming years, China will be a global force for decades to come—and its network of businesses, investments, and expatriates provide the country unique access to capabilities that it can leverage both in the gray zone and to meet traditional military goals. For example, TikTok may offer China the ability to push specific anti-US government content to users of the app in North America or in locations where there are ongoing US or NATO military operations. China’s continued investment in technology, education, and international relationships means that the country will continue to build this access in business, academia, and local politics in countries around the world—levers that can be pulled to meet China’s goals without the use of traditional military operations.

In contrast, Russia’s gray-zone capabilities are limited outside of its use of the paramilitary Wagner Group, information manipulation in the digital space, and traditional diplomatic efforts which include foreign intelligence operations to project power and contribute to paramilitary, influence, and harassment operations. As the political elite focuses on ways to make the domestic Russian audience feel powerful during a period of population and economic decline, gray-zone efforts will likely focus on meeting specific needs such as port access or supporting international political leaders. The Kremlin will aim to look strong to domestic and regional audiences, especially in Eastern Europe and South Asia, where Russia typically has influence. Moscow’s overarching threat to global interests will be its use of information operations to sow discord, clearing entry ways for Russian intelligence and business leaders to access locations of interest and providing localized support to fighting parties where political interests align.

—Jennifer A. Counter is a nonresident senior fellow within the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense practice and is a member of its Adding Color to the Gray Zone Task Force.

4. Deterrence is inherently a messaging game. What does this NDS say about the DOD’s approach to information operations?

Deterrence depends on the adversary’s perception of the United States’ capabilities and intent to use them. It also depends on an impression that if the adversary were to present a challenge, the United States would be able to cause enough damage to outweigh any gain for the adversary and its interests. Gauging an adversary’s perception, therefore, is necessary to understand the current deterrent threshold. Moving the threshold, if necessary, is dictated by how well a military manages the information domain. If a deterrent threshold is evaporating or degrading over time, then adjustments must be made to capabilities and perceived intentions, and then adequately conveyed to the adversary to restore the value of the deterrent. The NDS highlights the Pentagon’s aim to enhance its ability to operate in the information domain as a necessary component of this strategy.

Yet questions remain. The NDS highlights several new features with significant information elements to help organize and subsequently execute military activities across the entire conflict spectrum. First, the NDS’s focus on integrated deterrence calls for improvements across domains, agencies, and countries to better manage conflict in the information domain. Second, campaigns that cover the entire conflict spectrum—overlayed with the increased demands of implementing integrated deterrence—will require significant additional resources for all information components of the DOD. Who will manage a global information campaign in which all departmental information resources must be coherent, synchronized, and operationally relevant? Will the president’s budget for fiscal year 2024 reflect the need for additional resources to adequately coordinate campaigns that are overlapping and will run simultaneously across agencies, partners, and allies? Finally, is the department adequately organized to elevate information operations as a preeminent component of national power needed to implement integrated deterrence? The NDS is a good step forward, but organization and resourcing leading up to fiscal year 2024 will determine whether it can be implemented.

—Robert J. Giesler is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense practice and is a member of its Adding Color to the Gray Zone Task Force.

5. How can the US government and private sector complement traditional military efforts?

In roughly eighty pages, the 2022 NDS references economic tools fewer than a dozen times. While not surprising given that the document sets forth the DOD’s strategy, which consists primarily of non-economic tools, this underscores the importance of relying on other government agencies and departments to address what the NDS refers to as “economic coercion” carried out by the China against the United States and its allies and partners. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the shining example of this coercion, as it forces recipient nations to forfeit direct or indirect control over key strategic assets (such as a ports, airports, rail lines, and highways) if they fail to pay commercial loans. However, myriad other examples of economic coercion exist, including currency manipulation, technology transfer requirements (i.e., China requiring foreign firms to transfer technology to local firms in exchange for market access), and punitive tariffs.

So how can the United States combat economic hybrid warfare? The NDS acknowledges that DOD ought to rely on other agencies to take the lead on economic matters in the gray zone, stating that in many cases, tools such as economic measures “conducted by other US departments and agencies may prove more effective” than DOD’s military tools. This is where the panoply of US trade agencies—in conjunction with the Treasury and Commerce departments—can play a key role by establishing consistent, cross-agency policies regarding foreign investment, credit finance, trade policy, and sanctions to protect US defense interests and regain economic advantage. Still, DOD plays a significant role in advising these agencies on how to prioritize geographic focus areas and in evaluating where the greatest economic threats to US national security exist.

—David Fogel is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense practice and is a member of its Adding Color to the Gray Zone Task Force.

6. How should the DOD change its approach to counterintelligence (CI) under the integrated deterrence framework?

Integrated deterrence ought to include the use of CI capabilities resident within DOD’s authorities via Title 10 of the US Code, which outlines the DOD’s role in conducting military activities; Title 50 of the US Code, which grants the DOD and the intelligence community the authority to conduct intelligence and CI activities; and Executive Order 12333, which initially laid out the DOD’s intelligence and CI responsibilities. As the NDS notes, the United States can strengthen deterrence by conducting actions that raise an adversary’s cost with respect to the “perceived benefits of aggression.” One of the ways this can be accomplished is through synchronized messaging, complemented by real-world open activities and actions that utilize offensive CI operations in concert with the DOD planning community. For example, the DOD might use CI assets to pass information about a policy intent that complements a stated White House or State Department decision, all while moving DOD personnel and material into the theater to reinforce the United States’ overall intent.

Similarly, leveraging CI capabilities can help improve the resiliency of the vital networks and critical infrastructure supporting the cyber and space domains, as they utilize the same personnel, equipment, networks, and supply chains feeding into CI. The first order of business should be securing US supply chains in line with the Pentagon’s vision of delivering uncompromised, which is a DOD program aiming to bolster security across the entire defense enterprise by ensuring that foreign intelligence entities haven’t compromised technology (for example with insider threats or compromised chips) in the manufacturing process, which would assist with building enduring advantages throughout the defense ecosystem. To do so, the United States must move the manufacture of critical components back onshore to the United States and then use the tools and tradecraft of CI to ensure that the personnel, networks, intellectual property, and manufacturing processes associated with these “can’t lose” technologies are both vetted and protected.

—Thomas Ferguson is a member of Forward Defense’s Adding Color to the Gray Zone Task Force.

7. How can the Pentagon better leverage domestic and international partners, and the capabilities they own across domains, to fortify its integrated deterrence?

The NDS mandate to leverage every capability and advantage at DOD’s disposal, particularly to use advantages that DOD does not organically own, is astute and could not come at a better time for the United States. The two-decade war on terror provides a strong precedent for cross-government cooperation, which is potentially still applicable even as the US government shifts its focus from counterterrorism to strategic competition with China and Russia.

As a former Central Intelligence Agency leader, I saw first-hand the development, implementation, and impact of what was nicknamed “Title 60”—the portmanteau of titles 10 and 50 of US code—wherein the DOD and intelligence community (IC) worked seamlessly on the counterterrorism mission. This integrated cooperation between exquisite capabilities is the textbook example of what the NDS calls for, particularly in addressing competition in the gray zone. For example, both the IC and Special Operations Forces worked together to become experts at man-hunting in the war on terror, fusing signals intelligence, human intelligence, and overhead capabilities to ensure few places globally were out of reach in conducting “find, fix, finish” missions against terrorist targets. Such capabilities can similarly be used against today’s strategic competitors—why not merge joint talents to find hostile foreign intelligence officers working against US interests across the globe?

In sum, successes in the US war on terror were critically dependent on bilateral and multilateral partnerships. Both the IC and DOD deeply understand the value of partners, justifying integration on many levels such as intelligence sharing and (at times) cross-training. To meet the NDS remit to address gray zone threats, the DOD must build on these relationships and lessons and not let a new issue set cause formerly integrated capabilities to atrophy.

—Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense practice and is a member of its Adding Color to the Gray Zone Task Force.

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atlanticcouncil.org · by Katherine Walla · December 13, 2022

5. Russian disinformation rampant on far-right social media platforms

The Stanford report, "Bad Reputation - Suspected Russian Actors Leverage Alternative Tech Platforms in Continued Effort to Covertly Influence Right-Wing U.S. Audiences," can be downloaded here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23451812-graphika_stanford_report_bad_reputation-1

Russian disinformation rampant on far-right social media platforms

cyberscoop.com · by Suzanne Smalley · December 13, 2022

Written by Suzanne Smalley

Dec 13, 2022 | CYBERSCOOP

A report released Tuesday by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the social media analytics firm Graphika documents how suspected Russian information operators are exploiting a lack of enforcement on alternative social media platforms to target right-wing users with politically divisive disinformation.

The new research portrays a freewheeling alternative social media universe on platforms like Gab, Gettr, Parler and Truth Social where Russian information operators can freely share disinformation due to the lack of content moderation.

The Graphika and Stanford researchers say that a “set of 35 newly-discovered and previously-attributed inauthentic accounts” on these platforms build on previous Russian influence operations, likely committed by the same Russian actors.

“Some of the accounts in this network were first exposed in 2020, again in 2021, and most recently ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterms,” the report says. “Due to the apparent lack of enforcement, the actors have established a degree of persistence unavailable on most mainstream platforms and are able to conduct their operations with relative ease.”

While mainstream platforms have made major investments in detecting and removing efforts by foreign governments to target online users covertly, the lack of similar efforts by smaller platforms that are growing increasingly popular among conservatives has created an opening for information operations.

The Gab personas studied as part of the report are followed by a total of just 33,000 unique accounts. “In terms of influence or impact, [the accounts] mostly scream into an echo chamber on the fringes of the online conversation, with sporadic moments of ‘breakout,'” Graphika’s Director of Investigations Tyler Williams said in a statement.

In October the New York Times reported that while at least 69 million people have joined alternate platforms like Parler, Gab, Truth Social, Gettr and Rumble, false claims often start on those sites with a relatively small number of shares but nonetheless often make their way to mainstream sites like Facebook — and millions of eyeballs — from there.

According to the Graphika and Stanford report, based on “technical, behavioral and content indicators,” researchers believe with “high confidence” that the newly discovered operations are tied to the same Russian group thought to be behind the so-called Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC). NAEBC flooded American voters with disinformation in the run up to the 2020 elections and, according to Meta, is tied to the Russian Internet Research Agency.

The report’s authors describe the newly discovered fake accounts as a web of “highly-dense overlapping follower relationships on fringe platforms.” While the fringe platforms’ reach is limited, the report shows how mainstream social media platforms frequently amplified disinformation originating on alternative ones.

One of the 35 accounts at the heart of the new report is a Gettr account disguised as a Kid Rock fan page. In June, the report says, Donald Trump Jr. shared a screenshot of the page with the 6.1 million people who follow him on Instagram. The same Gettr account criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in October 2022, posts that were subsequently widely shared on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the report says.

The web of 35 accounts discussed in the report mostly attacked Democrats, sometimes with cruel memes. One features newly elected Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who recently suffered a stroke that caused him to speak haltingly, talking nonsense. Another post rants about President Biden’s “severe dementia” and “stolen elections.”

In some cases, the report says, the fake accounts went to astonishing lengths to look real. The fake accounts also worked to elevate some Republicans. One of the accounts has promoted Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her Arizona gubernatorial bid, and spread claims about stolen votes.

“One network asset on Gab even styled itself as a Kari Lake ‘war room’ and following her defeat has spread claims that the election was rigged,” the report says.

The report found examples of accounts in the network plagiarizing content from the Russian state media outlet RT without attribution. One of the fake Kid Rock fan page accounts posted a text passage about an alleged “sprawling network of secret biological labs” in Ukraine that was “copied verbatim” from an earlier RT article, the report said.

cyberscoop.com · by Suzanne Smalley · December 13, 2022

6. White paper protests end 'zero Covid' and rock China’s balance of power

The power of civil society. But is civil society in CHina powerful enough to effect significant change?

Can they go from "dictatorship to democracy" through non-violence? (Gene Sharp - https://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FDTD.pdf

White paper protests end 'zero Covid' and rock China’s balance of power

A wave of unrest across the country has forced the government's hand in easing restrictions but fears of more deaths are rising

Paul Nuki,

GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY EDITOR, LONDON

17 December 2022 • 12:00pm

The Telegraph · by Paul Nuki,

Nothing changes in China unless it’s initiated and approved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

That, until just a few short weeks ago, was how most experts believed modern China functioned. After all, the Party’s general secretary Xi Jinping only recently secured a third term in office – the first Chinese premier to do so since Chairman Mao.

Yet today things look very different. A brief but genuinely popular uprising against the country’s draconian Covid restrictions three weeks ago has upended the political calculus – and perhaps even the power balance – within the world’s most populous nation.

“For the first time I am optimistic”, said Carrot Cartoon, the nom de plume of a young satirical cartoonist from Hong Kong who now lives as a political refugee in London. “The protests have, for the first time, caused Xi to change direction.”

The spark for the protests was the CCP’s strict handling of Covid-19. On November 25, protesters in cities across the country came onto the streets and held aloft sheets of blank white paper to symbolise their lack of freedom amid rolling lockdowns.

A cartoon of the “A4 revolution” or “white paper protests” Credit: Carrot Cartoon,

The “A4 revolution”, or “white paper protests” as they have become known, were the most serious show of dissent since pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

As the Carrot Cartoons suggest, the spontaneity and size of the protests caught the CCP and its leader badly off-guard; faced with a wave of grass roots anger, Xi has had to drop the “zero Covid” policy his party congress reaffirmed just six weeks previously.

Memes depicting him as a frightened Pooh bear running away from a tsunami of white sheets or moving the goalposts at the world cup while seemingly unaware he has lost his shorts have proliferated across the internet.

In China itself, restrictions have now largely been lifted and the authorities are racing to vaccinate its most vulnerable in anticipation of huge waves of infection.

A cartoon showing moving the goalposts at the world cup while seemingly unaware he has lost his shorts have proliferated across the internet Credit: Carrot Cartoon

As reported by the Telegraph a month ago, China failed to make the most of its early success in fighting the virus by getting its elderly population fully vaccinated when jabs first came on stream in early 2021.

Older generations remember the cultural revolution under Chairman Mao and many still carry a deep distrust of both government and modern medicine.

There are now increasing signs of chaos emerging after the change in Covid policy, including long queues outside fever clinics, runs on medicines and panic buying across the country.

For all its efforts to quell the virus since it erupted in the central city of Wuhan in November 2019, China may now pay a price for shielding a population that lacks immunity because of low vaccination rates.

“Authorities have let cases in Beijing and other cities spread to the point where resuming restrictions, testing and tracing would be largely ineffective in bringing outbreaks under control,” analysts at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said in a note on Thursday.

“Upward of one million people could die from Covid in the coming months.”

Other experts have put the potential toll at more than two million. This is despite China reporting just 5,235 Covid-related deaths to date – extremely low by global standards.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, China’s stock markets and its currency fell last week over concerns of the disruption to come.

On Friday, China’s Cabinet ordered rural areas to prepare for the return of migrant workers this holiday season in hopes of mitigating disaster.

Medical resources in smaller cities and rural communities, which are home to around 500 million of the nation's 1.4 billion people, lag far behind those of large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Returnees must wear masks and avoid contact with elderly people and village committees must monitor their movements, say the new guidelines.

But for most people across China the attitude has shifted from one of fear to the idea that there is now little option but to live with the virus - the same feeling that swept Britain and most of Europe in the spring of 2021.

Liu Na, a 31 year-old mother from Shahe in north east China, is one of those billions who is done with being scared. After three lockdowns this year alone, and many more months at home, she is revelling in being outdoors with her daughter.

“Every time there’s another variant, I was afraid,” she told the Telegraph. “But enough already – let’s get it over with.”

Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security

The Telegraph · by Paul Nuki,

7. Putin's War - Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War

Please go to this link to read the article in proper interactive format and with the graphics. : https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-putin-war-failures-ukraine.html

Putin's War

By Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War

nytimes.com · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · December 16, 2022

Russian soldiers go into battle with little food, few bullets and instructions grabbed from Wikipedia for weapons they barely know how to use.

They plod through Ukraine with old maps like this one from the 1960s, recovered from the battlefield, or no maps at all.

They have trained at dilapidated Russian bases hollowed out by corruption, including this one, home to a tank division badly defeated in Ukraine.

They are given wildly unrealistic timetables and goals for taking Ukrainian territory and complain of being sent into a “meat grinder.”

Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training.

Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery. But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.

Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.

Flung to the ground, a drafted Russian soldier named Mikhail recalled opening his eyes to a shock: the shredded bodies of his comrades littering the field. Shrapnel had sliced open his belly, too. Desperate to escape, he said, he crawled to a thicket of trees and tried to dig a ditch with his hands.

Of the 60 members of his platoon near the eastern Ukrainian town of Pavlivka that day in late October, about 40 were killed, said Mikhail, speaking by phone from a military hospital outside Moscow. Only eight, he said, escaped serious injury.

“This isn’t war,” Mikhail said, struggling to speak through heavy, liquid breaths. “It’s the destruction of the Russian people by their own commanders.”

President Vladimir V. Putin’s war was never supposed to be like this. When the head of the C.I.A. traveled to Moscow last year to warn against invading Ukraine, he found a supremely confident Kremlin, with Mr. Putin’s national security adviser boasting that Russia’s cutting-edge armed forces were strong enough to stand up even to the Americans.

Russian invasion plans, obtained by The New York Times, show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Mr. Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How could one of the world’s most powerful militaries, led by a celebrated tactician like Mr. Putin, have faltered so badly against its much smaller, weaker rival? To piece together the answer, we drew from hundreds of Russian government emails, documents, invasion plans, military ledgers and propaganda directives. We listened to Russian phone calls from the battlefield and spoke with dozens of soldiers, senior officials and Putin confidants who have known him for decades.

The Times investigation found a stunning cascade of mistakes that started with Mr. Putin — profoundly isolated in the pandemic, obsessed with his legacy, convinced of his own brilliance — and continued long after drafted soldiers like Mikhail were sent to the slaughter.

At every turn, the failures ran deeper than previously known:

In interviews, Putin associates said he spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. Aides and hangers-on fueled his many grudges and suspicions, a feedback loop that one former confidant likened to the radicalizing effect of a social-media algorithm. Even some of the president’s closest advisers were left in the dark until the tanks began to move. As another longtime confidant put it, “Putin decided that his own thinking would be enough.”

The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been devoted to modernizing the armed forces under Mr. Putin, but corruption scandals ensnared thousands of officers. One military contractor described frantically hanging enormous patriotic banners to hide the decrepit conditions at a major Russian tank base, hoping to fool a delegation of top brass. The visitors were even prevented from going inside to use the bathroom, he said, lest they discover the ruse.

Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russia’s vaunted hacking squads tried, and failed, to win in what some officials call the first big test of cyberweapons in actual warfare. Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers. And Russia’s armed forces were so stodgy and sclerotic that they did not adapt, even after enduring huge losses on the battlefield. While their planes were being shot down, many Russian pilots flew as if they faced no danger, almost like they were at an air show.

Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters. Many were conscripts or ragtag separatists from Ukraine’s divided east, with gear from the 1940s or little more than printouts from the internet describing how to use a sniper rifle, suggesting soldiers learned how to fight on the fly. With new weapons from the West in hand, the Ukrainians beat them back, yet Russian commanders kept sending waves of ground troops into pointless assaults, again and again. “Nobody is going to stay alive,” one Russian soldier said he realized after being ordered into a fifth march directly in the sights of Ukrainian artillery. Finally, he and his demoralized comrades refused to go.

Mr. Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard, the leader of Chechnya and a mercenary boss who has provided catering for Kremlin events. As the initial invasion failed, the atomized approach only deepened, chipping away at an already disjointed war effort. Now, Mr. Putin’s fractured armies often function like rivals, competing for weapons and, at times, viciously turning on one another. One soldier recounted how the clashes became violent, with a Russian tank commander deliberately charging at his supposed allies and blowing up their checkpoint.

Since the early days of the invasion, Mr. Putin has conceded, privately, that the war has not gone as planned.

During a meeting in March with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel, Mr. Putin admitted that the Ukrainians were tougher “than I was told,” according to two people familiar with the exchange. “This will probably be much more difficult than we thought. But the war is on their territory, not ours. We are a big country and we have patience.”

People who know Mr. Putin say he is ready to sacrifice untold lives and treasure for as long as it takes, and in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Americans last month the Russians wanted to deliver a stark message to President Biden: No matter how many Russian soldiers are killed or wounded on the battlefield, Russia will not give up.

One NATO member is warning allies that Mr. Putin is ready to accept the deaths or injuries of as many as 300,000 Russian troops — roughly three times his estimated losses so far.

Just days after facing blowback about the war from normally friendly leaders in September, Mr. Putin doubled down on the invasion, calling up hundreds of thousands of Russians in a draft that was supposed to turn the war in Russia’s favor, but has instead stirred growing anger at home. Soon after, hundreds of Russian soldiers were killed outside Pavlivka, including Mikhail’s drafted comrades in the blind advance of the 155th.

“Legs, guts. I mean, meat. Just meat,” another member of the platoon, Aleksandr, said from a hospital in Russia. “I know it sounds terrible, but you can’t describe it any other way. People were turned into hamburger.”

Aleksandr recounted how he and his fellow draftees had asked their instructor in Russia what they could possibly learn about firing a gun and becoming soldiers in the few weeks before being sent to Ukraine.

“He was honest: ‘Nothing,’” Aleksandr said the instructor responded.

The more setbacks Mr. Putin endures on the battlefield, the more fears grow over how far he is willing to go. He has killed tens of thousands in Ukraine, leveled cities and targeted civilians for maximum pain — obliterating hospitals, schools and apartment buildings, while cutting off power and water to millions before winter. Each time Ukrainian forces score a major blow against Russia, the bombing of their country intensifies. And Mr. Putin has repeatedly reminded the world that he can use anything at his disposal, including nuclear arms, to pursue his notion of victory.

As far back as January, with the United States warning that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was imminent, a retired Russian general named Leonid Ivashov saw disaster on the horizon. In a rare open letter, he warned that using force against Ukraine would threaten “the very existence of Russia as a state.”

In a recent phone interview, General Ivashov said that his warnings before the war echoed what he had been hearing from nervous Russian military officials at the time. Though the Kremlin insisted an invasion was not on the table, some could tell otherwise. Service members told him that “victory in such a situation is impossible,” he said, but their superiors told them not to worry. A war would be a “walk in the park,” they were told.

The last 10 months, he went on, have turned out to be “even more tragic” than predicted. Nimble Ukrainian generals and soldiers have outmaneuvered a much bigger, more lethal foe. The West, cheered by Ukraine’s successes, has provided ever more powerful weapons to drive the Russians back.

“Never in its history has Russia made such stupid decisions,” General Ivashov said. “Alas, today stupidity has triumphed — stupidity, greed, a kind of vengefulness and even a kind of malice.”

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, blames the West, and the weapons it has given Ukraine, for Russia’s unexpected difficulties in the war.

“This is a big burden for us,” Mr. Peskov said, depicting Russia as taking on all of NATO’s military might in Ukraine. “It was just very hard to believe in such cynicism and in such bloodthirstiness on the part of the collective West.”

Some of the war’s original supporters are starting to reckon with the idea of defeat. Before the invasion, American intelligence agencies identified Oleg Tsaryov as a puppet leader the Kremlin could install once it took over Ukraine. His faith in the war has since slipped away.

“I was there. I participated” in the invasion, Mr. Tsaryov told The Times during a phone interview. But, he said, he was never told the final details and “the Russian Army didn’t understand” the Ukrainians would fight back, thinking “everything would be easy.”

Now, Mr. Tsaryov, a businessman from Ukraine, says he will be happy if the fighting simply ends along the current battle lines — with Russia having failed to capture and keep hold of a single regional capital since the invasion began.

“We’re losing Ukraine,” Mr. Tsaryov said. “We’ve already lost it.”

Oleksii bolted across the tarmac in the dark as the first Russian missiles landed, clambered into his Su-27 fighter jet and took off just as buildings across the airfield began to explode.

“At that moment, I understood that it was really something bad,” said Oleksii, 26, on condition that only his first name and rank, captain, be used. Some other soldiers and officials in this article were not authorized to speak publicly, or faced reprisals.

Just before 6 a.m. Moscow time, Mr. Putin declared the opening of his “special military operation” in a televised address. It began with an aerial bombardment to take out Ukraine’s air defenses, communications and radar installations — to overwhelm its military and shatter its ability to fight back.

More than 150 missiles thundered into Ukraine from bombers, submarines and ships. As many as 75 Russian aircraft streaked into Ukrainian skies, about the size of Ukraine’s entire working air combat fleet, analysts and officials said.

On his radar screen, Oleksii saw the blips of incoming missiles and enemy aircraft before getting his orders: Fly to a backup air base in central Ukraine. When he landed, he was astonished. Not only was his unit there, but a good portion of Ukraine’s remaining air force as well.

For days, he and his fellow pilots flew missions from their new base, wondering when Russian radar operators would finally notice them. A strike on their position could have been disastrous, gutting the Ukrainian defense, and the pilots assumed it was only a matter of time until one came. But it took four days for the Russians to attack, and most of the aircraft had moved to new locations by then, leaving Oleksii in amazement.

“It was really simple,” he said. “I don’t know how they missed this opportunity.”

The failure to destroy Ukraine’s modest air defenses was one of the most significant blunders of the war, foiling Russia’s mighty air force early on. Interviews revealed why that happened — and how the Ukrainians managed to stay a step ahead of their invaders.

Ukraine should have been overwhelmed. By one count, its fighter jets were outnumbered 15 to one in some early air battles. Russia’s planes were also more advanced, helping its pilots see farther and strike from greater distances. Russia had thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles that should have smothered Ukraine’s aging, Soviet-era defenses. That is what American and Ukrainian intelligence officials assumed, anyway, leading to predictions that Ukraine would fall within days.

So, Ukraine shuffled the deck. It moved some of its defenses — like Buk and S-300 missile launchers, along with its primary radio intelligence command and control center — to new sites before the war began, senior Ukrainian officials said. Russian missiles often hit the old locations instead. In all, as many as 60 percent of Russian cruise missiles missed their intended targets, American officials said.

Part of Russia’s problem was agility. Even if Russian forces had spotted Oleksii and his fellow pilots bunched together at their new rendezvous point, American officials said, Russia’s military was so rigid and centralized that it typically needed 48 to 72 hours to update its intelligence and get approval to go after new targets — by which time the Ukrainians were gone.

That same inflexibility made the Russians easy to hit. After failing to take out Ukraine’s defenses, many Russian pilots kept flying as if they had. Their ground-attack planes often flew sorties without backup from other fighter jets, the Ukrainians said, enabling outgunned pilots like Oleksii to catch them off-guard by flying at low altitudes, hidden from radar, and roaring up from below to shoot them down.

“Maybe the Russian Army didn’t read the Soviet books,” Oleksii said. “They flew straight without any cover. They had bombs, they had rockets, but they didn’t cover their attack aircraft.”

Then in March, when Russian pilots finally changed tactics and started flying low enough to duck under Ukrainian air defense radar, they fell into the sights of Ukrainian missiles, including shoulder-fired Stingers provided by the United States.

For Russian troops on the ground, it was a disaster.

Without air cover, they were suddenly far more vulnerable, throwing their troubled march toward Kyiv and other large cities further into disarray.

Though tens of thousands of them had amassed along Ukraine’s borders, hovering menacingly as if eager to strike, many never thought they were actually going to war. Like most of Russia, they figured it was just for show, to extract concessions from the West.

Interviews with Russian soldiers show how stunned they were when the orders came to invade. Cpl. Nikita Chibrin, a 27-year-old soldier in a motorized infantry brigade, said he had spent the month before in Belarus on what he and his fellow soldiers were told was a training exercise. On Feb. 23, he said, he and his unit were at their camp celebrating the Defender of the Fatherland holiday, snacking on candy they had been given for the occasion, when their commander approached.

“Tomorrow you are going to Ukraine to fuck up some shit,” he said the commander told them. There was no further explanation.

Before dawn on the 24th, Corporal Chibrin and his comrades loaded into a tracked armored personnel carrier. They had no instructions and no idea where they were headed, he said.

Another Russian soldier stationed in Belarus said he found out he was going to war only an hour before his unit began to march. The order was both simple and wildly optimistic: Follow the vehicle in front of you and reach Kyiv within 18 hours.

According to the unit’s schedule and logbook — which were obtained by The Times and reviewed by three independent military analysts, who considered them authentic — the first vehicles in his convoy were supposed to punch down from Belarus and arrive on the outskirts of Kyiv by 2:55 p.m., even faster than the soldier was told.

He didn’t come close. The massive vehicles were so heavy, ripping up the roads as they tried to move forward, that the convoy got bogged down immediately, the soldier said. It took more than a day just to cross the border into Ukraine.

It got worse from there. The logbook recorded day after day of delays, Ukrainian attacks and hundreds of injuries, deaths and destroyed vehicles.

Secret orders for a different Russian force — obtained by The Times and shared with four independent military analysts, all of whom said they were credible — were issued only hours before Mr. Putin’s announcement.

The orders, for a unit of the 26th Tank Regiment, were oddly overconfident, to the point of being contradictory. They anticipated a tangle of possible resistance from Ukrainian troops and planes, yet they still laid out a mostly uninhibited, 24-hour dash from Ukraine’s border with Russia to a point across the Dnipro River, about 250 miles away.

There, the unit would dig in, about two hours outside Kyiv, and block Ukrainian troops sweeping in from the south and east, the Russian war plans said. And no matter how fierce the enemy was, the unit was expected to complete the mission on its own.

“There are no forces or equipment for reinforcements,” the orders said.

Sure enough, the lumbering, largely unprotected Russian columns proved enticing targets.

On March 17, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander of Ukrainian forces, posted a video of burning tanks that he said belonged to the 26th Tank Regiment in northeastern Ukraine — hundreds of kilometers short of its intended destination.

The unit lost 16 vehicles in less than three weeks, according to Russian documents seized and published by Ukraine. The mother of one young tank soldier on the unit’s roster told Russian media that her son was brought home in pieces, identified only by his DNA.

Across Ukraine, the Russian losses mounted. A giant armored column of more than 30,000 troops at the core of Russia’s force pushing south toward the city of Chernihiv was eviscerated by a motley group of Ukrainian defenders outnumbered five to one, soldiers and senior officials said. The Ukrainians hid in the forest and picked apart the Russian column with shoulder-fired antitank weapons, like American-made Javelins.

One Russian soldier in the unit said he was shocked by the swiftness of the Ukrainian attack.

“In the first battle, the column was ambushed, and I was wounded, and that’s it,” he said. “For 24 hours, I was missing a leg, lying in a field waiting for my unit to come get me.”

The rout near Chernihiv spoiled part of Russia’s plan to envelop Kyiv.

Russian forces had counted on the element of surprise when wave upon wave of helicopters descended on the airport, home to the largest aircraft in the world: the An-225 Mriya, a cargo plane with a 290-foot wingspan that was an object of Ukrainian national pride.

Taking the airport would give Russian forces a beachhead to ferry in troops for the assault on Ukraine’s capital. But the Ukrainians expected as much. Using shoulder-fired missiles, they shot down Russian aircraft and killed as many as 300 Russian paratroopers, according to senior American and Ukrainian officials and the captured Russian logbook.

Fierce battles in the following days destroyed much of the airport, including the prized Mriya cargo jet, but thwarted Russia’s plans.

“Yes, we lost our Mriya,” said Col. Yuriy Ignat, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command. “But as a result the airport wasn’t lost.”

Russia not only botched the attack by land and air, but also put too much faith in another wing of its vaunted arsenal: hacking.

Even before the first missiles and shots were fired, unit 74455 of the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, or G.R.U., tried to infiltrate Ukrainian networks and shut them down.

Officials in Washington, who had been working closely with the Ukrainians to bolster their cyberdefenses for years, had been holding their breath. States had mainly used hacking for acts of espionage and financial thievery, for subversion and sabotage. But nobody really knew how it would play out in a full-scale military conflict.

“All this stuff that has been written about cyberwar has been speculative,” said a senior U.S. defense official. “For the first time, you have war and cyber together — the real thing.”

The Russian hacking unit, known as Sandworm, had long menaced Ukraine, waging attacks against the power grid starting in 2015. But it was labor intensive, and only somewhat effective. By one estimate, it took Sandworm about 19 months to prepare the attack on a power station in western Ukraine, yet it only caused a six-hour power outage.

A cyber cat-and-mouse game ensued, with the United States, Britain and other allies helping to shore up Ukrainian computers and stave off Russian intrusions.

On Feb. 23, hours before the invasion began, Sandworm took another swing, launching malware that infected several hundred Ukrainian government computers, officials said. The intrusion was detected quickly, the damage contained.

Then Sandworm struck again. But the code it used looked like it had been thrown together at the last minute, with programming errors — another fail.

Sandworm wasn’t done. In its boldest stroke yet, it went after the Ukrainian military’s satellite communications, used by soldiers in the field. It worked, and by 6:15 a.m. on Feb. 24, the system went down, right at Ukraine’s most vulnerable moment.

It could have been a crippling blow. But the Ukrainian government had a backup plan: a separate satellite communications system, which it had tested only two months before, to make sure it was ready in the event of a Russian invasion.

Russia had assumed its forces would march largely uncontested into Kyiv. When that didn’t happen, American officials suspect that Sandworm — like the rest of the Russian military — was caught off guard.

Soon, Russia’s missteps went from the sophisticated to the mundane.

With their plans for a speedy victory stymied, Russian forces were suddenly confronted with the most basic of problems: They hadn’t brought enough food, water or other supplies for a prolonged campaign. Soldiers resorted to looting grocery stores, hospitals and homes.

“The guys were going from apartment to apartment and taking out large bags — looting in all its glory,” one Russian soldier wrote in mid-March in his diary, which was recovered by Ukrainian troops in eastern Ukraine and shared with a Times reporter embedded with them. “Some take only what they need, some take everything, from old nonfunctional phones to plasma TVs, computers, and expensive alcohol.”

In the diary, the soldier recounts hunting for medicine, food and other essentials, describing the joy his men felt entering a grocery store.

“We found everything that we lacked so much, even sweets,” the soldier wrote. “Everyone rejoiced like children.”

He recounts nearly dying in a mortar attack and stalking a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier. But just as often, he appears concerned with basic provisions for himself and his comrades, describing how they scoured a hospital and came up with jam, cookies and raisins.

Two days later, he had more luck. “I found socks that are now worth their weight in gold,” he wrote.

Some Russian troops panicked, and even resorted to self-sabotage. One Pentagon intelligence report said that Russian military drivers were poking holes in their gas tanks, disabling their own vehicles to avoid going into battle.

The commander of a Ukrainian tank repair depot said some 30 Russian T-80 tanks in seemingly perfect condition were taken and delivered to him at the beginning of the war. When his mechanics inspected, they found sand had been poured into the fuel tanks, rendering them inoperable.

Ukrainian law enforcement officials started noticing something else suspicious as well: a spike in foreign cellphone numbers near the border, in the forests between Ukraine and Belarus.

Russian soldiers were using cellphones to call home, and suddenly popping up on Ukrainian networks. Officials who monitor the traffic during peacetime for criminal activity quickly realized they could see and hear the invaders approaching in real time.

“We listened to the Russian soldiers as they panicked and called their friends and relatives,” said an official who oversees the phone intercepts. “They used ordinary phones to make decisions about their further moves.”

Down long corridors guarded by locks with facial detection, behind doors sealed with wax to detect intruders, teams of women tracked the Russian troops from small listening booths while their friends and relatives grabbed rifles to patrol the streets.

“We understood where the enemy was, what numbers they were using,” the official said.

The eavesdroppers passed the details to Ukraine’s armed forces to carry out ambushes and counterattacks. Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said Ukrainian forces used cellphone signals and even TikTok videos to target a unit of Chechen soldiers known as the Kadyrovtsy, named for the strongman leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

It took 40 minutes from the time one video was uploaded to pinpoint the unit’s location near the Hostomel airport northwest of Kyiv, Mr. Budanov said. The Ukrainian military then hit them with three Tochka-U ballistic missiles, he said.

The Russians kept closing in on Kyiv, forcing the eavesdroppers tucked in listening rooms to make a quick decision: destroy their equipment and flee for their own safety, or hang on and continue gathering intelligence.

“We didn’t lose Ukraine. We didn’t let the enemy move further,” the official said. “On the first days, when they made foolish mistakes, we used their foolish mistakes to our advantage.”

William J. Burns, the director of the C.I.A., flew to Moscow, sat in a conference room near the Kremlin and waited until the formalities were over before explaining the real reason he had come.

It was early November 2021. The United States believed Mr. Putin was considering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Burns explained. If he proceeded down this path, Mr. Burns warned, the West would respond — decisively, in unison — and the consequences for Russia would be severe.

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council, stiffened and looked Mr. Burns in the eye, officials in the room said. He abandoned his notes and extolled the prowess of Russia’s armed forces. They had been so thoroughly modernized under Mr. Putin that they now rivaled the United States militarily, he said.

“Patrushev didn’t qualify it,” said John Sullivan, the American ambassador to Russia at the time, who was there. “He was just looking at Burns and saying: ‘We can do this. We’re back.’ The way I would describe it was that this was already decided, and they were supremely confident. His message was, ‘It’s not going to be a problem for us to do what we want to do.’”

Mr. Burns briefed Mr. Biden upon his return to Washington, officials said. Mr. Putin had all but made up his mind to take over Ukraine, Mr. Burns told him, and the Russians had absolute confidence victory would come swiftly.

To Mr. Putin, Ukraine is an artificial nation, used by the West to weaken Russia. He describes it as a cradle of Russian culture, a centerpiece of Russian identity that must be wrested back from the West and returned to Russia’s orbit.

In his eyes, that is the biggest unfinished mission of his 22 years in power, people who know him say.

He began as an unassuming bureaucrat-turned-president on New Year’s Eve, 1999, seen by the inner circle of his predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin, as a proficient manager who could bring stability without threatening the ruling elite.

By his third decade in power, Mr. Putin seems transformed, people who have known him since the 1990s say. He styles himself as a pivotal figure astride a millennium of Russian history — as he hinted when he unveiled a statue of Vladimir the Great, the medieval prince of Kyiv, outside the Kremlin walls in 2016.

That Vladimir “entered history as a uniter and protector of Russian lands,” Mr. Putin said.

The Vladimir at Russia’s helm in the 21st century, Mr. Putin has increasingly made plain, sees himself as carrying on that tradition.

“If everyone around you is telling you for 22 years that you are a super-genius, then you will start to believe that this is who you are,” said Oleg Tinkov, a former Russian banking tycoon who turned against Mr. Putin this year. “Russian businesspeople, Russian officials, the Russian people — they saw a czar in him. He just went nuts.”

Mr. Putin rose to power as a deft politician. He could flash charm, humility and a smile, painting himself as a reasonable leader to Russians and foreigners. He knew how to control his facial muscles in tense conversations, leaving his eyes as the only guide to his emotions, people who know him said.

But during his presidency, he increasingly wallowed in a swirl of grievances and obsessions: the West’s supposed disregard for the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany; the fear that NATO would base nuclear missiles in Ukraine to strike Moscow; modern-day gender politics in which, Mr. Putin often says, Mom and Dad are being replaced by “Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2.”

In the personalist system he has built, those quirks have global consequences.

“What he thinks about obsessively, and quite possibly falsely,” has ended up shaping “the biography of the whole world,” said Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor.

Mr. Putin seemed to think that only he truly understood Ukraine. After annexing the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Putin bragged that he had overruled his own advisers, who had considered the move too dangerous because of the risk of sanctions and a Ukrainian military response.

Back then, Mr. Putin’s instincts mostly proved right. The Ukrainian military withdrew swiftly from Crimea — some soldiers and sailors switched sides to join Russia — and the West’s limited sanctions scarcely affected Russia’s economy, sealing Mr. Putin’s confidence.

“I took responsibility for everything,” Mr. Putin said after taking Crimea, according to a confidant. “I will be gone sooner or later, but Crimea will have been returned to Russia forever.”

Many of the people closest to Mr. Putin had an incentive to cater to the boss’s rising self-regard — and to magnify the external threats and historical injustices that Mr. Putin saw himself as fighting against.

A former Putin confidant compared the dynamic to the radicalization spiral of a social media algorithm, feeding users content that provokes an emotional reaction.

“They read his mood and they start to slip him that kind of stuff,” he said.

By the summer of 2021, during a meeting that was supposed to be about the economy, Mr. Putin railed instead against the West and President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which Mr. Putin often cites as one of America’s great post-Cold War sins.

“We tried to partner with the West for many years, but the partnership was not accepted, it didn’t work,” Mr. Putin said, recalled his guest, who sat on the other end of a long table.

The words had a sort of finality to them, the visitor said: “It was like he was talking to himself, not to me.”

The guest had spent three days in quarantine before meeting with Mr. Putin at a distance of roughly 15 feet. It was a “light” option the Kremlin offered to people who sought face time with Mr. Putin but wanted to avoid the lengthy quarantines required for an up-close meeting with him, even in the pandemic’s second year.

Mr. Putin’s isolation deepened his radicalization, people who know him say. He went 16 months without meeting a single Western leader in person. He held just about all his meetings by videoconference from nondescript rooms that left his exact location a mystery. Those who got to see him in person saw their influence rise in a system in which access to Mr. Putin — referred to as “the boss” or “V.V.,” his first initials, by insiders — is the most valuable of currencies.

“Our most important resource is not a medal, not money and not possession of anything,” said Konstantin Zatulin, a member of Parliament in Mr. Putin’s United Russia party. “Our main, most important resource is access to the president.”

On that score, Yuri Kovalchuk, a conservative physicist and banking magnate who befriended Mr. Putin in the 1990s, did well during the pandemic. Mr. Kovalchuk bragged last year that he had spent several months in 2020 with Mr. Putin at his residence on Lake Valdai, between St. Petersburg and Moscow, according to a person who met with him then.

Mr. Kovalchuk told the person that Mr. Putin’s main achievement was “militarization” — the creation of an army and a society ready for war.

The secretive Mr. Kovalchuk prides himself as a strategist who sees Russia locked in an existential battle with the West, according to people who know him. In the last decade, he has expanded his television and newspaper holdings, key parts of the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus.

A onetime Putin confidant said Mr. Kovalchuk sees himself “as a visionary,” and the pandemic, given the extraordinary precautions Mr. Putin took, emerged as an opportunity for Mr. Kovalchuk to deepen his imprint on the president — and the nation.

Mr. Putin’s unfinished business with Ukraine also fed a growing personal animus toward Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

When Mr. Zelensky was elected in a landslide in 2019, the Kremlin saw him as someone it could work with: a Russian-speaking comedian who had lived in Moscow, performed on Russian television and won with a message of ending the war in eastern Ukraine that Russia had fueled.

And partly because Mr. Zelensky is Jewish, some in Moscow expected him to be tough on Ukraine’s nationalist wing, which venerated Ukrainian independence fighters who had fought alongside the Nazis in the closing battles of World War II.

“I think he is sincerely willing” to compromise with Russia, Mr. Putin said of Mr. Zelensky in 2019. “It is his sincere conviction, at least his striving.”

By early 2021, the Kremlin’s hopes had been dashed. Mr. Zelensky cracked down on pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, shutting down pro-Russian television channels and sanctioning Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch close to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Putin showed his frustration in a long meeting at his Sochi residence with Mr. Bennett, the new prime minister of Israel, in October 2021.

Mr. Putin charmed his guest, taking him into his private residence and pouring him a glass of whiskey. But when it came to Ukraine, Mr. Putin flashed anger. Mr. Bennett noted that Mr. Zelensky was interested in meeting Mr. Putin face to face.

“I have nothing to discuss with this person,” Mr. Putin shot back, according to two people familiar with the exchange. “What kind of Jew is he? He’s an enabler of Nazism.”

Some Western officials believe that, by that point, Mr. Putin may have already decided to go to war. But in Russia, even among those with access to Mr. Putin or his inner circle, almost no one thought that the president was seriously considering a full-scale invasion, people close to the Kremlin said. They were sure he was bluffing.

Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper editor, was one of them. As the chairman of the 2018 election campaign of Mayor Sergei S. Sobyanin of Moscow — Mr. Putin’s former chief of staff — he felt well-connected enough to happily announce to his wife a week before the invasion, “Lena, there won’t be a war!”

That day, he had met for two hours with several senior military officials. Rather than betray any hint of tension, they bantered about Mr. Remchukov’s newly svelte physique, queried him in detail about his weight-loss regimen and casually discussed their vacation plans for early March.

After he came home and described the meeting to his wife, he said, “she kissed me and said: ‘What happiness!’”

On Feb. 22, two days before the invasion, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, went to the Pentagon and said his nation desperately needed Stingers, the shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III offered to help before asking how the Ukrainian government planned to keep running after the Russians invaded. “If you get pushed out of Kyiv,” he said, “where are you going to go?”

Mr. Kuleba replied: “I can’t even acknowledge that. We’re not even going to talk about that or think about that.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Mr. Austin said. “But you need a plan.”

Soon, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined in, launching into what a senior American defense official described as a “‘you’re going to die’ speech.”

“They’re going to roll into Kyiv in a few days,” General Milley said. “They’re coming in with tanks and columns of formations. You need to be ready for that. You need to be prepared. If you’re not, it’s going to be a slaughter.”

As General Milley spoke, Mr. Kuleba and members of his delegation sat back in their chairs, their eyes widening.

The Ukrainian air force had trained with NATO members since 2011, and the partnership deepened after Russia took Crimea in 2014. Wary of another invasion, they carried out combat exercises in Ukraine and California, preparing the nation’s air force to take on its technologically superior enemy. In February, a secretive U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard team called Grey Wolf was set up at Ramstein Air Base in Germany to support the Ukrainians.

But General Milley still harbored serious doubts about Ukraine’s state of readiness. He had walked the halls of the Pentagon that winter with an enormous green map of Ukraine, with increasingly ominous projections from U.S. intelligence agencies of Russia’s invasion plans. What’s more, the American defense attaché at the embassy in Kyiv had spent weeks trying to get Ukraine’s defensive plans, and the ones she received minimized, in the Pentagon’s view, the Russian threat.

Mr. Austin seemed somewhat uncomfortable at General Milley’s blunt admonishment of the Ukrainian foreign minister and chimed in, reassuringly: “We’re going to do what we can to help these guys.”

The reality was slow to sink in for many in Moscow, too. Mr. Zatulin, a senior Putin ally in Russia’s Parliament, said he got his first inkling that the president was serious about an invasion in mid-February. Though known as a leading expert on Ukraine, Mr. Zatulin said he was never consulted on the possibility.

To the contrary, Mr. Zatulin said he was scheduled to give an address to the Russian Parliament on behalf of Mr. Putin’s United Russia party on Feb. 15 that was supposed to signal the opposite — that there would be no invasion unless Mr. Zelensky himself went on the offensive in Ukraine’s divided east. But just five minutes before the session was scheduled to start, Mr. Zatulin said, he got a message from an aide: The party’s leadership had canceled his speech.

“I was not ready for this turn of events,” Mr. Zatulin said. “Everything connected to this decision turned out to be a surprise not just for me, but also for a great many of the people in power.”

Mr. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, insisted that he found out about the invasion only once it had begun. Likewise, Anton Vaino, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff, and Aleksei Gromov, Mr. Putin’s powerful media adviser, also said they did not know in advance, according to people who spoke to them about it.

The best that senior aides could do was to try to read Mr. Putin’s body language. Some reported with concern that “he’s got this warlike twinkle in his eyes,” a person close to the Kremlin said.

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, said that amid Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine late last year, a deputy minister asked him if he knew what was going to happen.

“That means that no one has told the deputy minister,” Mr. Markov said. “Even some members” of Russia’s security council “weren’t told until the last moment.”

Russia’s main industrial association had been expecting to meet with Mr. Putin in February. On the agenda, among other things: the regulation of cryptocurrencies. But the meeting kept getting rescheduled, until finally, on Feb. 22 or Feb. 23, the Kremlin notified participants of the date: Feb. 24, the day Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine.

Andrey Melnichenko, a coal and fertilizer billionaire in that lobbying group, described how he woke up that day to the “madness” in Ukraine. But the meeting with Mr. Putin was still on, so a few hours later, he was at the Kremlin, as scheduled. In an anteroom, stunned tycoons were munching on sandwiches while awaiting the results of their coronavirus swabs to clear them to share Mr. Putin’s air.

When Mr. Putin finally appeared, the television cameras were rolling. He told the assembled billionaires that he had no choice but to invade.

“What happened, in my view, is irrational,” said Mr. Melnichenko, describing his reaction to the invasion. “It was shock.”

Another magnate recalled realizing — too late — that Mr. Putin was parading them in front of the television cameras, for all the world to see, for a carefully planned purpose. The point was “specifically to tar everyone there,” he said, “to get everyone sanctioned.”

There was no going back. They, like the rest of Russia, were in this with Mr. Putin now.

Sure enough, Mr. Melnichenko and all the other businessmen who appeared with Mr. Putin that day were hit with sanctions by the West in the months that followed.

Internal Rot

“Everyone was stealing and lying.”

Even as the Ukrainians rallied to beat back the Russian advance, Russian intelligence officers emailed instructions to state media, telling it to portray generous and triumphant Russian troops saving civilians from Ukraine’s villainous leaders.

Russia’s main security service, the F.S.B., worked hand in glove with the military and state television to project the illusion of success — and to conceal the dysfunction.

Internal Rot

“Everyone was stealing and lying.”

Russia’s main security service, the F.S.B., worked hand in glove with the military and state television to project the illusion of success — and to conceal the dysfunction.

Defeats became accomplishments, as if reflected through a carnival mirror. Despite Russia’s humiliating failure to seize Ukraine’s capital, its military sent TV crews a video about Ukrainians supposedly throwing down their NATO-provided guns.

As Russian troops retreated from areas around Kyiv in March, the F.S.B. boasted about the heroics of Russian special forces, claiming they stopped Ukrainians who terrorized pro-Russian civilians. In some cases, the agency even offered language to hide the source of the information: “A SOURCE CLOSE TO THE POWER STRUCTURES OF RUSSIA!!!!”

The messages, drawn from tens of thousands of emails leaked from Russia’s largest state-owned media company and reviewed by The Times, show how at least one engine of the Russian war effort purred along smoothly: the nation’s propaganda machine.

At times, Russia’s military and the F.S.B. directed coverage down to the video clips played and the time of publication. The emails, leaked from V.G.T.R.K., the state media giant that oversees some of Russia’s most-watched channels, portrayed Mr. Putin’s military as backed into a corner by NATO.

Once the full invasion began, the machine downplayed Russian atrocities, bolstered conspiracy theories and tried to portray Ukrainian troops as abandoning their posts. (After the emails were released by a group that publishes hacked documents, The Times verified the documents by confirming identities, email addresses and broadcasts on the air.)

Off camera, state media employees had little to no idea what was actually happening. A state television journalist said in an interview that as late as April, his Kremlin sources were still assuring him that the war would be over within days.

“Tomorrow morning, there’ll be a statement,” the journalist recalled one of his sources saying, only to be proved wrong the next day. “It was really kind of weird.”

But while state broadcasters kept delivering upbeat assessments, Mr. Putin privately acknowledged that his military was struggling.

During the meeting in March with Mr. Bennett of Israel — when Mr. Putin conceded that the war would be “much more difficult than we thought” — he returned to the theme that has become a fixation of his presidency: his place in Russian history.

“I won’t be the Russian leader who stood by and did nothing,” he told Mr. Bennett, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

Once again, Mr. Putin seemed convinced that future generations of Russians could be threatened by the West. He had spent years preparing for precisely such a clash, devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia’s military, supposedly to modernize it and strip out the corruption that had sapped it in the 1990s.

But while Russia made significant headway, Western officials said, a culture of graft and fraud persisted under Mr. Putin that emphasized loyalty above honesty, or even skill. The result was a hodgepodge of elite troops and bedraggled conscripts, advanced tanks and battalions that were powerful only on paper.

“Everyone was stealing and lying. This was a Soviet, and now Russian, tradition,” said Col. Vaidotas Malinionis, a retired Lithuanian commander who served in the Soviet military in the 1980s. Looking at satellite images of the army camp where he served, he said the old barracks and mess hall were still there, with no sign of modernization, and a few buildings had fallen down. “There has been no evolution at all, only regression,” he said.

European, American and Ukrainian officials warned against underestimating Russia, saying it had improved after its muddled invasion of Georgia in 2008. The defense minister overhauled the armed forces, forcibly retired about 40,000 officers and tried to impose more transparency on where money went.

“He made a lot of enemies,” said Dara Massicot, a RAND researcher who studies the Russian military.

Then, in 2012, that minister — in charge of dragging the military out of its post-Soviet dysfunction — became embroiled in a corruption scandal himself. Mr. Putin replaced him with Sergei K. Shoigu, who had no military experience but was seen as someone who could smooth ruffled feathers.

“Russia drew a lot of lessons from the Georgia war and started to rebuild their armed forces, but they built a new Potemkin village,” said Gintaras Bagdonas, the former head of Lithuania’s military intelligence. Much of the modernization drive was “just pokazukha,” he said, using a Russian term for window-dressing.

Contractors like Sergei Khrabrykh, a former Russian Army captain, were recruited into the stagecraft. He said he got a panicked call in 2016 from a deputy defense minister. A delegation of officials was scheduled to tour a training base of one of Russia’s premier tank units, the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, whose history dates to the victories of World War II.

Billions of rubles had been allocated for the base, Mr. Khrabrykh said, but most of the money was gone and virtually none of the work had been done. He said the minister begged him to transform it into a modern-looking facility before the delegation arrived.

“They needed to be guided around the territory and shown that the Kantemirovskaya Division was the coolest,” Mr. Khrabrykh said. He was given about $1.2 million and a month to do the job.

As he toured the base, Mr. Khrabrykh was stunned by the dilapidation. The Ministry of Defense had hailed the tank division as a unit that would defend Moscow in case of a NATO invasion. But the barracks were unfinished, with debris strewn across the floors, large holes in the ceiling and half-built cinder-block walls, according to photos Mr. Khrabrykh and his colleagues took. A tangle of electrical wires hung from a skinny pole.

“Just about everything was destroyed,” he said.

Before the delegation arrived, Mr. Khrabrykh said, he quickly constructed cheap facades and hung banners, covered in pictures of tanks and boasting the army was “stronger and sturdier year by year,” to disguise the worst of the decay. On the tour, he said, the visitors were guided along a careful route through the best-looking part of the base — and kept away from the bathrooms, which had not been repaired.

After the invasion started, the Kantemirovskaya Division pressed into northeastern Ukraine, only to be ravaged by Ukrainian forces. Crews limped away with many of their tanks abandoned or destroyed.

Russian prosecutors have pursued thousands of officers and others for corruption in recent years: One colonel was accused of embezzling money meant for vehicle batteries, another of fraud around mobile kitchens. The deputy chief of the general staff was charged with defrauding the state over radio gear, and a major general sentenced to prison in the case.

In 2019, Russia’s chief military prosecutor said that more than 2,800 officers had been disciplined over corruption violations in the past year alone.

After the invasion, American officials noticed that much of Russia’s equipment was poorly manufactured or in short supply. Tires on wheeled vehicles fell apart, stalling convoys, while soldiers resorted to crowdfunding for clothes, crutches and other basic supplies as the war wore on.

But even more consequential than the corruption, officials and analysts said, were the ways Mr. Putin fundamentally misunderstood his own military.

Russia had, in fact, spent 20 years getting ready for a radically different kind of war.

It had not prepared its military to invade and occupy a country as big and powerful as Ukraine, officials and analysts said. Instead, Russia had largely organized its military to keep U.S. and NATO forces away by inflicting maximum damage from afar.

Central to this strategy was a series of outposts — Kaliningrad by the Baltic, Crimea in the Black Sea, and the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean — to use long-range missiles to keep Western forces at bay. In the event of conflict, Russia intended to blind the enemy and destroy it from a distance, American officials said.

But in this case, Russia did not crush Ukraine with weeks of missile strikes in advance. It marched in quickly with forces on the ground.

Unlike its more limited campaigns in places like Syria — or the big hypothetical war with NATO it had long planned for — the invasion of Ukraine was simply “not what the Russian military was designed to do,” putting it in a position it was probably “least prepared” to deal with, said Clint Reach, a researcher at RAND.

In other words, the Kremlin picked the “stupidest” of all potential military options by rushing forward and trying to take over Ukraine, said General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

Russia had not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert, move quickly and then do it all again from a new location, officials said. It did not have a clear Plan B after the march on Kyiv failed, and commanders had long been afraid to report bad news to their bosses.

“The collective system of circular, mutual self-deception is the herpes of the Russian Army,” the pro-Russian militia commander Aleksandr Khodakovsky wrote on Telegram in June.

The mounting failures drove a cadre of pro-Russian military bloggers to a boiling point. While still cheerleaders for the war, they began to openly criticize Russia’s performance.

“I’ve been keeping quiet for a long time,” the blogger Yuri Podolyaka said in May, after hundreds of soldiers died in a river crossing. “Due to stupidity — I emphasize, because of the stupidity of the Russian command — at least one battalion tactical group was burned, possibly two.”

The fury eventually reached Mr. Putin himself. On the sidelines of his marquee annual economic conference in St. Petersburg in June, the president held a meeting that had become a tradition: a sit-down with news media chiefs. This time, though, the bloggers were the headline guests.

Mr. Putin sat alone at one end in a cavernous hall, according to one attendee, who provided a photo of the private gathering. Some of the bloggers took the floor and peppered Mr. Putin with messages and complaints from the front.

“It became a very concrete conversation, a surprising one for us,” the person present said. “We’d never had such conversations.”

It appeared to the person there that Russia’s intelligence agencies were using the bloggers to shift the blame for the war’s failings to the Ministry of Defense. Mr. Zatulin, the Putin ally in Parliament, insisted he supported the war, but said a blame game has broken out, and took a side himself.

“Of course, to a certain degree, we now have an element of everyone wanting to dump the responsibility on someone else,” Mr. Zatulin said.

“But I think that the main miscalculations,” he added, “were made by the Defense Ministry and the General Staff” — the military’s top brass.

A photocopied letter offered motivation: “Soldiers, take care of yourself and come back home swiftly to your family and close ones healthy and alive,” it read. “Goodbye.”

His mission seemed clear enough. With his marksman’s rifle, bundle of papers and copies of his Russian passport in his pack, Ruslan was one of thousands of poorly trained, underequipped men asked to defend a huge swath of territory that Russia had seized in northeastern Ukraine.

By summer’s end, Russian leaders had sent their best troops far to the south, leaving skeleton crews behind. So when the Ukrainians swept in and attacked the northeast, hoping to recapture occupied land, soldiers like Ruslan were cut down or melted away in a chaotic retreat.

Military analysts had warned of such a danger before the invasion. Even as tens of thousands of Russian soldiers massed ominously along Ukraine’s borders, they said, the Kremlin had not sent enough to occupy the entire country. The Russian war plans for the 26th Tank Regiment signaled the same problem: Expect no reinforcements.

Russia managed to take territory, frequently at enormous cost. But how to keep it was often an afterthought.

“The army, the generals, the soldiers weren’t ready,” said Mr. Tsaryov, the man American officials identified as a puppet leader the Kremlin could install in Ukraine.

He said the Russian Army had spread itself so thin across Ukraine after invading that it “would move through cities and not leave behind even a garrison, even a small one to stick up a Russian flag and defend it.”

In the northeastern region of Kharkiv, Russian commanders put men like Ruslan at roadblocks and moved on.

He had little else besides the printouts in his pack, which Ukrainian soldiers recovered with what they believe to be his body in September. The rifle next to him suggested he was a sniper. But while snipers in modern militaries often go through weeks of additional special training, Ruslan’s teacher appeared to be the internet.

“Hello dear soldier!” read the unsigned letter in his pack. “You have to risk your life so that we can live peacefully. Thanks to you and your comrades our army remains so strong, mighty and can protect us from any enemy.”

More than 50 pages of Russian documents, collected from three towns in the Kharkiv region and reviewed by The Times, show a timeless truth: Foot soldiers bear the outsize burden of combat.

The documents — shared with three independent military experts, who considered them credible — detail how Russia relied on bedraggled backup forces, many of them separatist fighters from Ukraine’s long conflict in its divided east, to hold territory as the regular Russian Army fought hundreds of miles away.

The 202nd Rifle Regiment of the Luhansk People’s Republic — Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine — was one of them. It had nearly 2,000 men, but was almost completely dependent on foot soldiers.

More than a dozen pages of its rosters detail the particulars of the unit’s suffering, down to a lack of warm clothing and boots.

Several of its soldiers were in their 50s, including one who experienced “cardiac failure,” while one of its youngest casualties, a 20-year-old named Vladimir, endured “frostbite of the lower limbs.” Yet another complained on a phone call intercepted by the Ukrainians that he had no armored vest and a helmet from the 1940s.

“Our battalion, for instance, has already gone more than three weeks without receiving ammunition from the army,” the pro-Russian militia commander, Mr. Khodakovsky, said on Telegram in September.

In an interview, another soldier described having only the vaguest sense of how to use his weapon.

He recounted being advised to fire judiciously, one round at a time, rather than blasting his rifle uncontrollably. But he wasn’t sure how to do that. So, shortly before going into combat, he said, he turned to a commander and asked how to switch his rifle off fully automatic.

Russia came to rely on such battered, inexperienced troops after months of tactics that more closely resembled 1917 than 2022. Commanders sent waves of troops into the range of heavy artillery, eking out a few yards of territory at grievous tolls.

When one Russian unit arrived in eastern Ukraine, it was quickly whittled down to a haggard few, according to one of its soldiers.

During fighting in the spring, he said, his commanders ordered an offensive, promising artillery to support the attack. It never came, he said, and his unit was devastated.

Yet commanders sent them right back into the melee all the same.

“How much time has passed now? Nine months, I think?” he said. “In this whole time, nothing has changed. They have not learned. They have not drawn any conclusions from their mistakes.”

He recounted another battle in which commanders sent soldiers down the same path to the front, over and over. On each trip, he said, bodies fell around him. Finally, after being ordered to go a fifth time, he and his unit refused to go, he said.

In all, he said, his unit lost about 70 percent of its soldiers to death and injury, ruining any faith he had in his commanders.

“Nobody is going to stay alive,” he said. “One way or another, one weapon or another is going to kill you.”

American officials realized early on that they had vastly overestimated Russia’s military. The morale of rank-and-file soldiers was so low, the Americans said, that Russia began moving its generals to the front lines to shore it up.

But the generals made a deadly mistake: They positioned themselves near antennas and communications arrays, making them easy to find, the Americans said.

Ukraine started killing Russian generals, yet the risky Russian visits to the front lines continued. Finally, in late April, the Russian chief of the general staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, made secret plans to go himself.

American officials said they found out, but kept the information from the Ukrainians, worried they would strike. Killing General Gerasimov could sharply escalate the conflict, officials said, and while the Americans were committed to helping Ukraine, they didn’t want to set off a war between the United States and Russia.

The Ukrainians learned of the general’s plans anyway, putting the Americans in a bind. After checking with the White House, senior American officials asked the Ukrainians to call off the attack.

“We told them not to do it,” a senior American official said. “We were like, ‘Hey, that’s too much.’”

The message arrived too late. Ukrainian military officials told the Americans that they had already launched their attack on the general's position.

Dozens of Russians were killed in the strike, officials said. General Gerasimov wasn’t one of them.

Russian military leaders scaled back their visits to the front after that.

More than 20 years into a murder sentence, Yevgeny Nuzhin saw his chance at salvation swoop in by helicopter.

Mr. Prigozhin — the close confidant of Mr. Putin, known for stirring up trouble across the Middle East and Africa with his mercenary army, Wagner — came to Mr. Nuzhin’s prison south of Moscow in August, looking for recruits.

Heaving with patriotic fervor, Mr. Prigozhin gave the kind of speech he has delivered at other Russian prisons in recent months, some shared online. In one, also from August, Mr. Prigozhin, dressed in a drab beige uniform, promised pardons for the inmates who made it back from Ukraine alive. Those who didn’t, he said, would “be buried in the alleys of the heroes.”

He also issued a warning: Anyone thinking of deserting his forces once in Ukraine, he said in the video, would be shot.

Mr. Nuzhin accepted Mr. Prigozhin’s offer, but ignored the warning.

After two days at the front, where he spent his time collecting the bodies of dead Wagner soldiers, he used the cover of darkness to slip away and surrender to Ukrainian troops.

“What good has Putin done in the time that he has been in power? Has he done anything good?” Mr. Nuzhin told The Times after being taken into Ukrainian custody. “I think this war is Putin’s grave.”

Mr. Putin’s reliance on mercenaries and convicts is one of the more unusual features of his war in Ukraine. Mr. Prigozhin is just one of a handful of strongmen active in the war, all of them managed by Mr. Putin, who has carved up the administration of much of Russia into competing fiefs run by people loyal to him above all.

Beyond the mercenaries controlled by Mr. Prigozhin, who rose to prominence as a caterer of Kremlin events, there is also the Russian national guard, overseen by Mr. Putin’s former bodyguard. And there is the unit commanded by the Chechen leader, Mr. Kadyrov — whose fighters were found and attacked because of their misadventures on TikTok.

As far as officials can tell, the Russian military has limited coordination with any of them.

“There was no unified command, there was no single headquarters, there was no single concept and there was no unified planning of actions and command,” said General Ivashov, the retired Russian officer who warned the war would go badly. “It was destined to be a defeat.”

The splintered Russian forces have sparred openly. After Russian forces withdrew from northeast Ukraine in late summer, Mr. Kadyrov called for the Russian commander responsible to be demoted to private and shipped to the front, “to wash his shame away with blood.”

Mr. Prigozhin weighed in, too: “All these bastards should go with machine guns barefoot to the front.”

The public finger-pointing has added to a sense of disarray within the Russian war effort. Mr. Putin has replaced several top military commanders. Yet he has stuck with Mr. Shoigu, his defense minister, and with General Gerasimov, the chief of the military’s general staff, because firing them would amount to a public acknowledgment that the war is going badly, an admission Mr. Putin is loath to make, argued General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief.

“They are still trying to maintain the illusion that everything is going well,” he said.

The friction has, at times, run all the way down to the troops in the battle zone.

After a battlefield argument in the Zaporizhzhia region over the summer, a Russian tank commander drove his T-90 tank not at the enemy but toward a group of Russian national guard troops, firing at their checkpoint and blowing it up, said Fidar Khubaev, describing himself as а Russian drone operator who witnessed the episode.

“Those types of things happen there,” said Mr. Khubaev, adding that he fled Russia in the fall.

Of all the supplementary armies charging into Ukraine, Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner has become especially pivotal. Its troops have received glowing coverage on Russian state television, and in November they were profiled in a documentary film called “Wagner: Contract with the Motherland” produced by RT, one of the Kremlin’s primary propaganda outlets.

“Until recently, Wagner has been one of the most closed and secretive organizations, but for us they have made a huge exception,” Andrey Yashchenko, the film’s presenter, says in the opening montage, which shows tanks rolling through rubble-strewn villages.

In the first five months of the war, there was almost no public mention of Wagner or Mr. Prigozhin’s involvement in Ukraine. By late summer, as the Russian military began to collapse under Ukrainian campaigns in the northeast and south, Mr. Prigozhin stepped into the spotlight.

After years of denying any links to Wagner — and sometimes its very existence — Mr. Prigozhin suddenly went public, making a show of visiting his troops in Ukraine, handing out medals, attending funerals and trumpeting his independence on the battlefield.

“Wagner almost always fights alone,” he said in an Oct. 14 post on the page of his catering company on VK, a Russian social media site.

A Times analysis of videos in Ukraine found that Wagner troops are often showcasing some of Russia’s most advanced weaponry, including tanks, fighter aircraft and thermobaric rocket launchers. And because of his connection with the president, Mr. Prigozhin is given priority over other military units for arms and equipment, a senior European official said.

Mr. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, denied that Russia’s separate fighting forces were causing confusion or division, insisting they all report to Russia’s top military brass. The prominence of Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Kadyrov, he said, was merely a function of their public-relations efforts.

“Some people are more active in the information space, some people are less active,” Mr. Peskov said. “But it doesn’t signify any, let’s say, independence.”

Despite its weaponry and bravado, Wagner has struggled on the battlefield. Some Ukrainian soldiers say it is a formidable foe. Yet for nearly six months, Wagner’s troops have been trying to seize the small industrial city of Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, and have been kept at bay by Ukrainian forces at great cost to both sides — prompting a rare public acknowledgment of Ukraine’s fighting prowess.

“The situation is difficult but stable,” Mr. Prigozhin said in the Oct. 14 post. “The Ukrainians are offering dignified resistance. The legend about Ukrainians running away is just that, a legend. Ukrainians are guys with steel balls just like us. This isn’t a bad thing. As Slavs, we should take pride in this.”

Hundreds of Wagner troops have been killed in the war, and several of the group’s fighter jets have been downed. The convicts Mr. Prigozhin has recruited appear to be little more than cannon fodder and make up a vast majority of casualties among Wagner forces, according to an assessment by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, which said in October that about 8,000 Wagner troops were fighting in Ukraine.

Another former Russian inmate recruited by Mr. Prigozhin said he was left in a shallow trench at the front lines near Bakhmut for four days with no food or water and little sense of what he was supposed to be doing, other than dragging away the many bodies of his dead comrades.

It was no wonder, he said, that some of Wagner’s recruits decided to flee.

To keep control, Mr. Prigozhin has resorted to extreme punishment, showing how the war has whittled away the vestiges of rule of law in Russia.

Like Mr. Putin, whose spies have been accused of poisoning and assassinating perceived traitors all over the world, Mr. Prigozhin has said that treachery is the worst sin any Russian can commit. He has proposed setting up his own Gestapo-like police force to hunt down the disloyal, including, he has said, Russian businessmen “who leave our country in their business jets.”

The fate of Mr. Nuzhin serves as a grisly warning.

Mindful of the pressures on prisoners of war and the risks they face, The Times has chosen to withhold their names. And, as with the other people we interviewed, we use documents and other evidence to vet their claims.

In Mr. Nuzhin’s case, we did not publish our interview with him, but he also spoke to Ukrainian media, which broadcast portions of his account. Soon after, he was released in a prisoner swap — and ended up back in the hands of Wagner.

He then appeared in a video on a pro-Russian Telegram account. In it, Mr. Nuzhin’s head was taped to a block. Looming over him was a man in camouflage, holding a sledgehammer.

“I woke up in this basement, where I was told that I will be judged,” Mr. Nuzhin says in the video, his voice dry and gravelly. The sledgehammer then swings down and crushes his skull.

Shortly after, Mr. Prigozhin released a statement endorsing Mr. Nuzhin’s murder.

“Nuzhin betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, betrayed them consciously,” the statement said. “He planned his escape. Nuzhin is a traitor.”

A day later, asked about the video on a conference call with journalists, Mr. Peskov said, “It’s not our business.”

nytimes.com · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · December 16, 2022

8. The China-Russia ‘Alliance’: Double the Danger or Limited Partnership?

Conclusion:

In sum, cooperation between China and Russia tends to look more like coordination. Yet, to judge from coordination between Moscow and Beijing on Ukraine, this can still be effective in achieving the limited goals of these two partners. Xi may have assessed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a serious blunder, highlighting Russia’s status as a great power in decline. Nevertheless, Xi is more likely to look for ways to prop up Putin rather than walk away.

China has no good options for reliable like-minded strategic partners with heft to balance against the United States. All the good allies are taken. However, even a limited partnership between a hurricane and climate change can wreak havoc upon countries that stand in their way.

The China-Russia ‘Alliance’: Double the Danger or Limited Partnership?

The Ukraine war shows that while the 'no limits' Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership does have limits, it remains threatening.

Thursday, December 15, 2022 /

BY: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.; Niklas Swanström, Ph.D.

usip.org

Indeed, much attention by officials and commentators has focused on the simple assertion that China and Russia pose different challenges to the United States and other allies and partners in Europe. The consensus U.S. view has been that China constitutes the serious rival while Russia poses a significant nuisance threat as it experiences political and economic decline, producing a predisposition in recent years to use military force around its periphery. According to one group of researchers writing in 2017, “Russia is a rogue, not a peer; China is a peer, not a rogue.” This assessment was made before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but this act of aggression has only reinforced the picture of Russia as a pariah power.

Another widely held view is that Moscow is a more immediate in-your-face adversary while Beijing is more of an over-the-horizon emerging threat. As one U.S. official pithily put it in 2019: “Russia [is] a hurricane. It comes on hard and fast. China … is climate change: long, slow, pervasive.”

Not surprisingly, the immediate fears of U.S. partners and allies in Europe over the last decade or more have focused on Russia’s multiple acts of aggression and intimidation, spiking with Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. What is surprising, however, is the ratcheting up of alarm across Europe in recent years over a seemingly more geographically distant threat: China.

Some European leaders, such as Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, have expressed serious concerns. In De Croo’s view, “in the past, I think … [Europe has] been a bit too complacent. … On some domains … [China has become] a fierce competitor. On some domains, we also see that they have hostile behavior. … We should understand that in a lot of economic domains, it’s also geostrategic [competition].” Meanwhile, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “We’re witnessing quite an acceleration … of … tensions [with China].”

That said, European capitals face parallel stark economic challenges from Beijing and Moscow: over-dependence, albeit manifest in different ways. Whereas, many European states are over-reliant on Russian energy, much of Europe depends heavily on trade with and investments in China. While the Russian energy issue is high-profile, the China trade and investment issue is less well known. China is the number one source of Europe’s imported goods, accounting for 22 percent in 2021. China is also the third largest market for European exports. Meanwhile, according to a recent study by the Rhodium Group, European Union investments in China are concentrated among the 10 top European investors, which comprise almost 80 percent of all European investments in the country.

Lessons of Ukraine

The protracted conflict in Ukraine provides an invaluable concrete case to explore what Russia-China cooperation looks like.

While Putin likely informed Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping that a “special military operation” against Ukraine would be forthcoming when the former visited Beijing on the eve of the 2022 Winter Olympics back in early February, it is much less likely that the Russian dictator shared details regarding the extent or timing of the invasion with his Chinese counterpart. Furthermore, neither leader could have anticipated the scale of operational incompetence and tactical ineptitude of the Russian military on the one hand and Ukraine’s resolute resistance and battlefield effectiveness on the other.

Some have asserted that the Moscow-Beijing axis constitutes a full-blown military alliance while others have argued that the relationship is little more than an “axis of convenience.” Real allies support one another in time of war and, if China and Russia were military allies, then one would expect Beijing to at least be providing armaments and other assistance. Yet, more than eight months into the Ukraine conflict, Beijing does not appear to be providing any weapons to its purported ally. Instead, key suppliers to Moscow seem to be Pyongyang (for ammunition) and Tehran (for drones). So, the “no limits” strategic partnership between China and Russia does indeed have some limits.

Xi is Putin’s ‘Silent Partner’

That said, Beijing’s tacit economic support of Moscow — through its continued and expanding trade and exploiting the loopholes in international sanctions — enables Russia. According to Reuters, Chinese shipments to Russia increased by more than 26 percent compared to the year before and imports climbed almost 60 percent during the same period. While Beijing may not be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Moscow on the battlefield, Xi is helping to bankroll Putin’s war.

Although Beijing has sought to distance itself from Moscow, Russia’s ongoing military imbroglio in Ukraine has not caused Xi to break off his bromance with Putin. There has been no nasty breakup akin to the Sino-Soviet divorce six decades earlier. On the contrary, Beijing continues to help Moscow in significant but low-key ways. While China has declined to support Russia actively or openly, Beijing has demurred from publicly condemning Russian aggression. Moreover, on November 14 at the G-20 Summit in Indonesia, Xi reportedly told Biden that China was “highly concerned about the current situation in Ukraine,” and delivered rhetorical flourishes insisting that “China … stood on the side of peace.” Xi also proclaimed to Biden that there should be “… peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.”

Yet, China has made no meaningful move toward mediation. Instead, Xi told Biden: “we hope that the United States, NATO and the EU will conduct comprehensive dialogues with Russia.” Furthermore, in Uzbekistan, a month earlier, at the 2022 Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit on September 15, Putin praised Xi for taking a “balanced position” on Ukraine. In a real sense Beijing then, by refusing to publicly take sides and declining to play an active peacemaking role in the United Nations or other venues, has shown itself to be Moscow’s “silent partner” — a silent partner that intends to slow down the conflict or even halt it on terms that are favorable to Russia. While almost certainly desiring an end to the conflict, Beijing would much prefer an outcome that preserves as much as possible of Moscow’s geopolitical influence and great power status.

Different Strokes

The case of Ukraine also highlights the different styles adopted and threats posed to Europe and the United States by Russia and China and their preferred modes of cooperation. Moscow tends to be more obnoxious and direct in mischief making. As Ken McCallum, the director-general of MI5 — the United Kingdom’s counter-intelligence service — noted in November 2022, “Russia thinks nothing of throwing an elbow in the face and routinely cheats to get its way.” Certainly, in Ukraine, Moscow has had no qualms against inflicting massive death and destruction against civilian targets.

By contrast, Beijing is more inclined to take a less obviously aggressive or at least more measured use of force and low-key approach (except domestically). Of course, where Taiwan is concerned, China has been direct in expressing its displeasure and not demurred from large scale displays of military power in close vicinity to the island, notably in the immediate aftermath of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August. However, China has so far refrained from actual kinetic strikes against Taiwan targets, much less launched an outright invasion of the island. Nevertheless, Xi has now formally linked achieving unification with Taiwan with realizing China’s dream of national rejuvenation. Moreover, China, under Xi, has initiated and sustained a concerted campaign of military coercion and political intimidation against the island in recent months.

Where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is concerned, China has worked assiduously within arenas, such as the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly, to block resolutions condemning Russia. McCallum notes that China poses “a different order of challenge [than Russia].” In contrast to Moscow, Beijing is prone to work within the system, leveraging its position and influence to defend its equities and advance its interests. Beyond this, China has become a savvy insider, and McCallum, employing a competitive sports analogy, contends that Beijing is “… trying to rewrite the rule book, [and even] to buy the league….”

The Trouble with Coordination

In sum, cooperation between China and Russia tends to look more like coordination. Yet, to judge from coordination between Moscow and Beijing on Ukraine, this can still be effective in achieving the limited goals of these two partners. Xi may have assessed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a serious blunder, highlighting Russia’s status as a great power in decline. Nevertheless, Xi is more likely to look for ways to prop up Putin rather than walk away.

China has no good options for reliable like-minded strategic partners with heft to balance against the United States. All the good allies are taken. However, even a limited partnership between a hurricane and climate change can wreak havoc upon countries that stand in their way.

Niklas Swanström is the director of the Institute for Security and Development Policy based in Stockholm, Sweden.

usip.org

9. Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

Wishful thinking?

But if it comes to pass, what comes next? Are we ready?

Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

ENDGAME

The war in Ukraine has destroyed Putin’s aura of infallibility back home, and even the Kremlin seems to have realized this is the beginning of the end.

Anna Nemtsova

Updated Dec. 18, 2022 2:32AM ET / Published Dec. 17, 2022 8:03PM ET

The Daily Beast · December 18, 2022

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

More than two decades after he came to power, President Putin’s grip on the Russian people is finally starting to falter.

“Putin could have ruled longer, if he did not start this war but now his days are really numbered”

— Yulia Galiamina

Putin’s rock-solid system is crumbling.

Tatiana Yashina, 62, the mother of jailed opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said the last week has seen a turning point in Putin’s regime.

“Putin is falling apart,” she told The Daily Beast. “He is clearly lying right in front of the cameras—with no confidence in his voice.”

Putin’s contortions are no longer convincing his domestic audience.

“This is a dead end, his plan has failed in Ukraine”

— Olga Bychkova

Every Kremlin attempt to rebuild the image of Putin as superman seems to provoke another avalanche of jokes online.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was forced to go on the record explaining that the Mercedes just happened to be on hand, and it was no indication of Putin’s vehicular preferences.

Last week, the Kremlin published an image of Putin with a glass of champagne in his hand, and that immediately gave rise to many anecdotes about “drunk Putin.”

The prevailing mood is becoming very hard for the Kremlin to navigate.

The question now is how much worse is the situation going to get?

After years of adulation across the country, Putin is becoming more isolated by the day.

The Daily Beast · December 18, 2022

10. China’s Belt and Road comes untracked in SE Europe

Excerpts:

Even if geopolitical tensions subside, European governments are getting serious about curtailing the social and environmental failures that plague many Chinese-funded projects. It will only get harder for China’s state-owned giants to win tenders, acquire European companies or invest in building local production plants.

China’s domestic political context also matters. As seen at the 20th party congress and with the current wave of protest, China’s leaders are firmly focused on domestic prosperity and social order.

Long-term Chinese investments will remain an integral part of Southeast European societies, but China’s political influence in the region should not be taken for granted.

China’s Belt and Road comes untracked in SE Europe

BRI projects have stalled and few new ones announced in region as earlier period of naive optimism draws to a close

By IGOR ROGELJA

DECEMBER 18, 2022

asiatimes.com · by Igor Rogelja · December 18, 2022

When the Peljesac Bridge in southern Croatia opened on 26 July 2022, it was the second time a Chinese construction company, the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), had built a sizable bridge in Southeast Europe.

It was also the second time that Li Keqiang, China’s now-former premier, attended an opening ceremony for a Chinese-constructed bridge in Southeast Europe.

While the opening of the Pupin bridge in Belgrade featured hundreds of Chinese flags and a visit by the premier, the 2022 opening of the Peljesac bridge was quite different.

During the lavish inauguration of the bridge, Li addressed the crowd via livestream with a speech extolling the friendship and cooperation between China and Croatia. Local media dismissed the talk as long and tedious. No Chinese flags were seen among the Croatian nationalist imagery.

One reason these two events were so different is the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s “zero-Covid” policy has made overseas trips a rarity for Chinese leaders and citizens alike.

Chinese construction sites in the region have faced staff shortages caused by Covid-19 restrictions. Even as European societies have slowly opened up, strict rules adopted by Chinese companies have separated the lives of Chinese employees from their local colleagues — even more than before.

Local Chinese managers of Gorenje, a Slovenian electronics manufacturer acquired by Hisense, were reprimanded by their superiors for Covid-19 outbreaks in the company. Chinese employees were advised not to socialize with their Slovenian counterparts to prevent infections.

It’s hard to build “people-to-people” links, as Chinese Communist Party foreign policy calls for, when the barriers to interaction only get higher.

While China and its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have not left Southeast Europe, a period of naive optimism and excitement is drawing to a close. Many headlining projects have stalled. It’s not just old projects fading out — few new projects have been announced in recent years.

Partly, this reflects shifts away from coal, which once made up most Chinese-funded projects in Southeast Europe. Even so, few “green” projects involving China have been announced in the region, leaving an infrastructural gap that may not be filled with Chinese loans or contractors.

A picture taken on April 8, 2019, shows the first section of a highway connecting the city of Bar on Montenegroís Adriatic coast to landlocked neighbor Serbia, (Bar-Boljare highway) near the village of Bioce, north of Montenegrin capital Podgorica, which is being constructed by China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), the large state-owned Chinese company. Photo: AFP by Savo Prelevic

Covid-19 is not the only barrier standing between China and Southeast Europe. The European Union’s (EU) new guidelines on excluding “third country” (Chinese) bidders from public tenders were first applied in Southeast Europe. In 2020, the Slovenian procurement commission excluded all bids by Chinese SOEs to build a new US$1.2 billion rail line.

China is excluded because it is not a party to the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Government Procurement. The European Commission seems to be flexing its regulatory muscle with new guidelines for member states.

Such rules are getting stricter too. In March 2022, the European Parliament and national governments agreed on an International Procurement Instrument after a decade of negotiations. The instrument demands market access reciprocity and makes it possible for member states to consider the social, environmental or security implications of allowing a third-country bidder to participate in large public tenders.

The Commission specifically mentioned the Peljesac bridge as an example of the problem — while European companies seldom win public tenders in China, a Chinese SOE won a $355 million contract almost entirely funded by the EU.

Another hotly debated measure is the “anti-coercion instrument” that would allow the EU to respond to third countries that exert economic pressure on individual member states, as happened in the case of China’s sanctions on Lithuania over its relations with Taiwan.

The EU’s hawkishness on China affects the “waiting room” of the Balkans as well. Montenegro’s humiliating experience of being refused an EU bail-out for its Chinese loan troubles sent a strong message to the region, especially to bigger EU candidate countries like Serbia.

Serbia remains China’s only real friend in the region. Although distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Serbia continues to balance between “the West and the rest” in its foreign policy.

But even in Serbia, China’s image has recently taken a hit. An increase in local protests and civil society monitoring of Chinese investments has raised the political cost of cosying up to these far-away investors.

Working conditions at the building site of a major tire factory became a national talking point in 2021. Conditions became so bad that the Serbian president and prime minister got involved to reassure the public that the government respects workers’ rights.

In the country’s east, a slow-burning conflict between local environmental activists and Chinese mining giant Zijin has escalated of late. Protesters occupied a local hill in Majdanpek that is earmarked for demolition, while local journalists have investigated Zijin’s treatment of Chinese miners.

China became a player in Southeast Europe because of its SOEs and no-questions-asked loans. In return, China wanted its SOEs to work on big construction projects in the region and build up portfolios that would allow them to bid for projects in EU states — something the CRBC managed to do with the Peljesac bridge. The route to such bids appears closed for now.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (L) walks with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of People in Beijing on April 25, 2019. Photo: AFP / Pool / Kenzaburo Fukuhara

Even if geopolitical tensions subside, European governments are getting serious about curtailing the social and environmental failures that plague many Chinese-funded projects. It will only get harder for China’s state-owned giants to win tenders, acquire European companies or invest in building local production plants.

China’s domestic political context also matters. As seen at the 20th party congress and with the current wave of protest, China’s leaders are firmly focused on domestic prosperity and social order.

Long-term Chinese investments will remain an integral part of Southeast European societies, but China’s political influence in the region should not be taken for granted.

Igor Rogelja is Lecturer in Global Politics at University College London.

This article, republished with permission, was first published by East Asia Forum, which is based out of the Crawford School of Public Policy within the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

asiatimes.com · by Igor Rogelja · December 18, 2022

11. No clear path to US-China reconciliation

Excerpts:

The trend over the last three decades has been for Beijing to state that claim with increasing forcefulness, enlarge its capability to enforce that claim and operate its maritime military and quasi-military units aggressively. There is no visible leeway for Beijing to climb down from that posture.

US politicians have highlighted concerns about other policies that the Chinese government is equally unlikely to change. One is the persecution of Chinese Uighurs. The PRC is not budging from its position that this charge is a “lie” and an “attempt to smear China.”

Nor will Beijing willingly discard any of these bedrock principles of its rule:

its aspiration to lead the world in crucial advanced technologies;
the basic features of its economic system; and
the CCP’s monopoly over political power in China.

Perhaps senior officials from the two countries can be more flexible in private than their public stances suggest. Increasingly, however, the bilateral hostility is multi-dimensional: strategic, economic, and ideological. Despite the mutual desire for reconciliation in principle, there is no clear path to achieving it in practice.

We are left with PRC officials futilely repeating their non-solution that “The US should reflect on its mistakes and correct them.”

No clear path to US-China reconciliation

The rising notion that unilateral concession-giving by Washington is the only way to rehabilitate Sino-US relations is wrong

By DENNY ROY

DECEMBER 17, 2022

asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · December 17, 2022

Plenty of analysts, including Americans, argue that improvement in US-China relations depends on the United States adjusting its behavior to accommodate Chinese concerns.

This curiously absolves Beijing of equivalent responsibility. It also deflects the important question of whether the government of the People’s Republic of China has trapped itself into an inability to make the policy changes that could resuscitate bilateral relations.

Cornell University professor Jessica Chen Weiss, in a much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs, acknowledges the dangers of “aggression” and “coercion” by the PRC but limits her specific policy recommendations to the United States. Weiss says Washington should:

halt acts that seem to encourage de facto independence by Taiwan;
stop “reflexively opposing” Chinese international initiatives;
cease targeting Chinese technology firms; and
work through international groupings that include China rather than those that exclude China.

A December 2022 report by the Quincy Institute recommends that Washington eventually withdraw US forces from South Korea and rescind the US-ROK alliance, abandon AUKUS, limit the Quad to non-military activities, cease courting India as a security partner and stay out of a Taiwan Strait war because a “US defeat” would be “almost certain” and because defending Taiwan is not a vital interest for either the United States or Japan.

Political commentators Nathan J Robinson and Noam Chomsky call upon Americans to stop using China as an imaginary enemy for domestic political purposes and to “abandon the desire to permanently preserve our hegemony.” They add that “The US needs to stop needlessly stoking conflict” and start to “think about how things look from the Chinese perspective.”

Jonathan Tepperman, former editor of Foreign Policy, advises that the United States should “push back against China’s bad behavior” – but that the best way to do so would be “by toning down [US] ideological rhetoric, as well as by abandoning [US] attempts to decouple the US and Chinese economies.”

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs opines that the US government should “stop putting Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong at the center of our relations with China” so that the United States and China together can “get along and settle crucial global problems” such as climate change.

To some extent, these commentaries echo the PRC government’s position, which places the blame for poor bilateral relations and the onus for improving them entirely on the United States.

The premise that unilateral concession-giving by Washington is the only way to rehabilitate Sino-US relations is wrong.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in a combination file photo. Photos: AFP / Nicolas Asfouri and Nicholas Kamm

Washington has legitimate regional and global interests, some of which are at odds with the PRC’s agenda and behavior. These interests include protecting friends and allies and standing up for international legal and ethical principles that are widely shared.

If any government deserves having the international community comply with 100% of its demands, it is certainly not that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Beijing is routinely deceptive and non-transparent, flouts international law when it conflicts with China’s self-interest, breaks international agreements, practices economic coercion, carries out illegal activities on a large scale and still denies it is implementing mass incarceration of Chinese Muslims.

The “14 grievances” that the PRC government presented to Australia in 2020 included Chinese displeasure about the following actions:

Canberra enacting legislation to prevent foreign interference in Australian elections;
Australia’s “call for an independent inquiry into the Covid-19 virus”;
Australia “peddling lies around Xinjiang” and accusing China of cyber-attacks; and
“unfriendly” reporting about China in Australian media.

A year later, the Chinese government similarly gave visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman what the PRC media called a “List of US Wrongdoings that Must Stop,” a tally of alleged indignities that was clearly designed to please a domestic Chinese audience.

Practical political necessity might compel a weaker country to unequally accommodate a stronger country’s preferences, but that situation does not apply here. The United States is economically, militarily and diplomatically stronger than China and also has more soft power and more and better security partners.

A reasonable expectation is that Beijing and Washington should negotiate an understanding in which both sides make concessions in the interest of achieving a more robust peace.

Both PRC and US officials have expressed the desire for rapprochement, but this is unlikely to occur without adjustments of policies by one or both sides. It is seriously questionable whether Beijing is willing and able to make compromises on any of the issues that cause the most tension in China-US relations.

Taiwan has become the most prominent and dangerous flashpoint. The PRC policies that especially alarm Americans are China’s military (both nuclear and conventional) buildup and threat to use force if necessary to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s rule.

The PRC government is fundamentally committed to both of those policies. A renunciation of either is unimaginable. The PRC leadership seems to believe (probably correctly) that, absent the threat of military force, Taiwan’s people would vote to declare formal independence from China.

Pro-Taiwan independence activists call for a referendum during a demonstration in Taipei on October 20, 2018. Photo: AFP / Sam Yeh

Leaders as well as the general public in China believe a wealthy state should have commensurately strong military forces – fuguo, qiangbing – especially given the lesson of the “century of humiliation” and the aspiration to eventually displace the United States as the leading power in eastern Asia and the western Pacific.

The next most dangerous flashpoint is the South China Sea. The bilateral dispute arises from the PRC’s claiming as its territory what the United States considers international waters and airspace.

The trend over the last three decades has been for Beijing to state that claim with increasing forcefulness, enlarge its capability to enforce that claim and operate its maritime military and quasi-military units aggressively. There is no visible leeway for Beijing to climb down from that posture.

US politicians have highlighted concerns about other policies that the Chinese government is equally unlikely to change. One is the persecution of Chinese Uighurs. The PRC is not budging from its position that this charge is a “lie” and an “attempt to smear China.”

Nor will Beijing willingly discard any of these bedrock principles of its rule:

its aspiration to lead the world in crucial advanced technologies;
the basic features of its economic system; and
the CCP’s monopoly over political power in China.

Perhaps senior officials from the two countries can be more flexible in private than their public stances suggest. Increasingly, however, the bilateral hostility is multi-dimensional: strategic, economic, and ideological. Despite the mutual desire for reconciliation in principle, there is no clear path to achieving it in practice.

We are left with PRC officials futilely repeating their non-solution that “The US should reflect on its mistakes and correct them.”

RoyD@EastWestCenter.org) is a senior fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu. He specializes in strategic and international security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Follow him on Twitter: @Denny_Roy808.

asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · December 17, 2022

12. The fentanyl wars: China, Mexico and the US

Is this "Unrestricted Warfare?" Is this a deliberate attempt to cause American society to crumble from within? Most basically, is this a deliberate act of subversion?

The fentanyl wars: China, Mexico and the US

asiatimes.com · by More by Daniel Williams · December 15, 2022

With key assistance from China, Mexico is keeping at crisis level the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

At least 70,000 Americans, mostly between the ages of 18 and 35, have died after ingesting fentanyl pills so far this year. That’s close to the 71,000 dead out of more than 100,000 drug fatalities in 2021 and a big jump from 57,000 deaths the year before. Millions of pills have illicitly passed through the US southern border in recent years.

In 2020, US President Joe Biden declared a “whole of government” campaign to stem the opiate flood into the country. However, the illicit flood of drugs continues unabated due to Washington’s inability to persuade – or pressure – China and Mexico to halt their roles in it. In particular:

China won’t stop criminal gangs from providing the chemicals used in Mexico to manufacture fentanyl.
Mexico won’t fully crack down on illicit industries that make and transfer the finished product to the US.

Relations between Mexico and the United States have long stumbled over differing views of the cross-border drug problem. Mexico traditionally blames America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics, while the US regards Mexico as irretrievably crippled by massive corruption that lets criminal narcotics traffic flourish.

Meanwhile, tensions with China over issues unrelated to drug trafficking have all but erased cooperation toward curbing it, including:

China’s militarization of the South China Sea;
US criticism of human rights in China; and
The future of Taiwan, and Chinese insistence it comes under Beijing’s control.

Better times in the Sino-US relationship: Fentanyl drug traffickers are sentenced in court in 2019 in Xingtai in northeast China’s Hebei province. The court sentenced at least nine fentanyl traffickers in a case that was the culmination of a rare collaboration between Chinese and US law enforcement to crack down on global networks that manufacture and distribute lethal synthetic opioids. Photo: Jin Liangkuai / Xinhua

Almost two years into his term, Biden has fashioned an excuse to explain the massive traffic: Victims of drug use are afraid to acknowledge their addiction.

“We’re looking at continuing to make progress because we know there’s still a ways to go,” Biden said Thursday.

“We’re not going to let stigma drive us anymore,” he added. “We’re going to go where we need to go to help people thrive.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkus has reassuredly claimed that the border is “secure.”

Taking a less boastful view, Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram said the administration had been overly focused on heroin commerce, even as Mexican traffickers made and shipped more fentanyl than heroin. “It is a new, deeper, more deadly threat than we have ever seen, and I don’t think that the full extent of that harm was immediately seen,” she said.

Unable to get sufficient help from either Mexico or China to stem the flow, the Biden administration instead is focusing on educational efforts to curb drug use. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the government is concentrating on “expanding care” for addicts and on taking “harm reduction” measures to expand access to medical counseling and care.

America’s destructive divided politics hurt efforts to stop the smuggling of the powerful and deadly drug.

The Biden administration, for its part, rolled out a new publicity campaign under the slogan “One Pill Can Kill.” A TV advertisement, produced on behalf of the Center for Disease Control and broadcast during a World Cup game, was entitled “Stop Overdose: Illegal Fentanyl.” It depicted a voracious crocodile consuming the lives of drug users.

Arrayed against this inward-looking approach are critics who view the problem as a drug invasion by Mexico and China. That approach was used by Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, except that he spent more energy on battling illegal immigration than interdicting narcotics trafficking.

The lack of cooperation from both Mexico City and Beijing rankles even some American politicians who support Biden generally.

David Trone, an American lawmaker and member of Biden’s Democratic Party, said, “Our success, right now, on slowing or stopping the movement of fentanyl across the border is close to zero. We are failing because we have two partners, China and Mexico, who have chosen not to participate in any meaningful way to help us.”

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel López Obrador, in power since 2018, initially prioritized control of cocaine and methamphetamine traffic. Those two were the main hard drugs used in Mexico.

On the theory that fentanyl was only being transported through Mexico – not produced inside the country – he unleashed the Mexican armed forces to curtail the traffic starting in 2019. Seizures of shipments slowly increased into 2021, but it had long been apparent there were hundreds of fentanyl factories scattered among mountains in west Mexico. Few of those were shut down.

Only this year did Mexico expand its “chemical watch list” to include ingredients used in fentanyl production.

Up until 2019, two large Mexico crime cartels in northern Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, were engaged in ferrying Chinese-made fentanyl from ships arriving in Manzanillo on the Pacific Ocean coast to the US border, where it crossed hidden in cargo trucks.

The towns of Nogales, Arizona., left, and Nogales, Mexico, stand separated by a high concrete and steel fence. Photo by Sgt Gordon Hyde / US Army

Then, at the behest of the US and in line with its own law enforcement priorities, China placed controls over all fentanyl exportation, including to Mexico. But, China has tens of thousands of private chemical factories capable of producing so-called precursor ingredients used to manufacture fentanyl.

“China has some 5,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, but regulators scrutinize a small share of companies,” a report from the Rand Corporation think tank asserted.

For this galaxy of chemical factories, Mexico provides an attractive market. Moreover, not all variations of the fentanyl precursors produced in China are illegal. Chinese producers were also adept at altering the chemical formulas of some precursors to avoid bans on exports.

By 2021, Chinese traffickers had established formal cooperation with the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels and provided them handy instruction for increasing fentanyl production, according to the DEA. And the cartels, despite being locked in constant turf wars, both sourced fentanyl precursor material from the same suppliers.

“Instead of halting the production of fentanyl,” wrote the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington think tank, China’s ban led to a shift in production.

A new, unrelated factor, has also opened the way for increased China-Mexico drug business: tensions between the US and China on non-drug issues.

China has taken umbrage at American sanctions imposed over repression in Xinjiang, home to China’s restive Muslim Uighur population.

After the US Department of Commerce in 2020 added a branch of Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security to its list of organizations “implicated in human rights violations” in Xinjiang, China “appeared to back away from” counter-narcotic cooperation, according to the Congressional Research Center.

China’s embassy in Washington said recent US criticism “greatly affected China’s goodwill to help the US in fighting drugs.”

Last December, China stopped its efforts to control the production of fentanyl precursors, the Biden administration reported. The Chinese Foreign Ministry argued that China cannot be blamed for US drug problems because Beijing adopts a “zero-tolerance” approach to narcotics trafficking.

A bottle of fentanyl pharmaceuticals is displayed in Anyang city, central China’s Henan province, November 12, 2018. Photo: AFP Forum

Finally, in the wake of the August visit by US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, China’s Foreign Ministry announced it would suspend cooperation in combatting narcotics traffic.

It looks like a severe case of collateral damage, suggested Geopolitical Monitor, an intelligence online publication based in Toronto.

“Given the geopolitical gridlock between the US and China, bilateral cooperation between the two seems unlikely, prolonging the already detrimental wave of the ongoing US opioid crisis,” it predicted.

asiatimes.com · by More by Daniel Williams · December 15, 2022

13. Pentagon's New UFO Office: No Aliens But Many Threat Concerns

Pentagon's New UFO Office: No Aliens But Many Threat Concerns

The Pentagon’s new office isn’t just investigating new sightings, it’s also looking back decades for info on other U.S. UFO programs.

HOWARD ALTMAN

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 17, 2022

There is still no evidence that space aliens are visiting or have visited the earth, the new Pentagon office tasked with tracking such reports said during a Friday afternoon press briefing. But in hundreds of new cases of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is investigating, there are indications of potential threats to U.S. military installations and observations of objects with flight dynamics requiring more research, officials told reporters, including from The War Zone.

AARO was created in July to handle the government’s investigation into unidentified objects on and under the sea, in the air as well as in space - and any “transmedium” objects shifting between those domains. It was launched amid growing concerns about threats to U.S. military installations and naval and air assets from objects of unknown origin and was a rebranding of a previous Pentagon UAP investigation effort - called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Group (AOIMSG) - to broaden its scope of operations.

The press briefing, by Under Secretary of Defense Ronald Moultrie and AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, came a day after the Senate passed the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes language codifying how AARO will investigate these objects and protect Defense Department employees and contractors who report details about them. It is anticipated that the NDAA will be approved by President Joe Biden.

The briefing also came as the wait continues for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hotly anticipated new report on UAPs, which will include specific details of the number of new cases being examined and how many of those were unable to be identified. Its last report, delivered in June 2021, found that of 144 cases investigated, only one could be identified - a large deflating balloon. When asked Friday by The War Zone when that report will be released, an ODNI spokesperson declined to comment.

The initial ODNI report on UAPs found just one out of 144 that could be identified.

Kirkpatrick said Friday that while AARO is investing hundreds of new reports, that load does not represent a significant increase since May. That's when Scott W. Bray, the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, testified before Congress that 400 new reports came in after the initial 2021 ODNI report.

During Friday's press briefing, Moultrie and Kirkpatrick both declined to say how many of the new cases - mostly unknown objects in the sky - have been identified after investigation. They instead deferred to the looming new ODNI report.

However, though it’s still early in the research process, AARO has “not seen anything that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” Moultrie said. “If we find something like that, we will look at it and analyze it and take the appropriate actions.”

Asked about investigations into past incidents reported to the government, Moultrie said he has “not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation and alien crash or anything like that.”

Nor, he said, has there been any “credible reporting” to date of transmedium objects.

“I don’t want to be definitive and say there is nothing that is there, but I will say we have not seen…any indications that there have been transmedium activities.”

AARO, however, is "concerned about objects that appear - and this has happened for decades - on the sea, near our bases and installations and ports,” said Moultrie. The War Zone has previously done a great deal of investigative reporting on those concerns, which you can read more about here.

A U.S. Navy briefing slide, obtained by The War Zone, assessed that in 2019 a commercial cargo ship was likely conducting surveillance on Navy vessels using drones, or unidentified aerial vehicles (UAV).

Moultrie also raised concerns about “submersible things that are underwater that may appear within restricted or close to restricted spaces. We're concerned about things that may be in proximity to our bases, or they've been things that may be in proximity to assets that we have in space. And so we track those things all the time to ensure that we're aware of what they are. And we try to characterize those immediately.”

Moultrie, however, declined to offer details about what AARO is doing about objects in space.

"I think our ability right now to resolve things in the space domain and what we have in the space domain is something that would fall under sensitive sources and methods and means so would be would prefer not to respond to that," he said.

When it comes to broader national security concerns, Moultrie was quick to point out that “any platform not authorized to be in a domain that is restricted, we consider that to be a potential threat to the safety of our personnel or to our platforms.”

AARO is “still trying to resolve some of these cases,” he said. “Some of them probably could not be characterized as civilian balloons or [drones] or whatever. So, in the absence of being able to resolve what something is, we assumed that it may be hostile. And so we have to take that seriously.”

There is also an effort to ensure deconfliction between reports that come in and "blue" classified Pentagon and intelligence community technology programs, Kirkpatrick said.

When asked if AARO has detected any UAPs demonstrating technology it’s unable to explain, Kirkpatrick said: “there are things that appear to demonstrate interesting flight dynamics that we are fully investigating and researching right now.”

That could be due to a wide range of things, he said.

“Some of that could be sensor phenomenology,” he said, referring to the behavior of sensors under different conditions. “Some of that could be flight dynamics of the platform. Some of that could be just an illusion. There's lots of different ways that we have to investigate all those in order to get to that truth.”

The effort to determine the origin of an object is being aided by new and recalibrated existing sensors, said Kirkpatrick.

“We have a collection plan that we are building off of,” he said. “We have some sensors that we are investing in, but we're also looking at conventional [sensors]. We have off-the-shelf theater assets and whatnot, as well as re-calibrating the sensors to ensure we know what knowns look like. And that way we can weed those out. So it's still a little early, but it's moving forward.”

While he would not offer specifics on what kinds of sensors, it is well known that among other things, AARO will piggyback on efforts already underway to upgrade the architecture of existing sensor networks to be able to better detect low-flying and small radar cross-section cruise missiles and drones.

That includes an upgrade of F-15C/D and F-16C/D jets tasked with homeland defense with active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, for instance, which can detect small, low-flying targets.

In addition, adding infrared search-and-track (IRST) systems will help these fighters further to detect and identify these hard-to-spot targets. That process is ongoing now, as well. But these are just some first steps and a much more extensive sensor upgrade will be needed to better surveil the approaches to the continental U.S. and monitor for these threats. These same capabilities could be brought to bear for detecting and classifying UAPs. This includes having networking and sensor fusion capabilities so that even more complex targets – like those employing electronic warfare tactics – can still be detected, understood, and dealt with if need be.

Beyond sensors, there has been an effort to improve human intelligence collection from troops and contractors who are observing these objects.

“The stigma associated with UAP reporting has been significantly reduced,” said Kirkpatrick. “While that's good news, more work needs to be done. building on that progress. AARO is working with the military departments and the joint staff to normalize, integrate, and expand UAP reporting beyond the aviators to all service members, including mariners, submariners, and our space guardians. AARO is working to take in more UAP reporting and analysis from the interagency, FAA, NOAA Coast Guard and the Department of Energy to name a few.”

The NDAA section dealing with UAPs is designed to codify that.

It includes improved ways for DOD employees and contractors with knowledge of these objects to come forward without fear of reprisal and efforts to reduce the stigma that once plagued those who reported what is now called UAPs. It also calls for the investigation of reports dating back to January, 1945. That includes compartmentalized programs buried in the system decades ago.

"That is going to be quite a research project, if you will, into the archives and going backwards in time," Kirkpatrick said.

The NDAA that passed largely mirrors the amendment introduced in July by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc). You can read more about that in our coverage here.

Moultrie and Kirkpatrick said that an increased effort at governmental transparency, better reporting practices and greater emphasis on improving technology should offer the clearest picture yet of what these UAPs are, where they come from and what threats they really represent.

Given the U.S. government’s long and tortured history with the topic, it remains to be seen just how successful they will be.

The new ODNI report that Kirkpatrick said “will be coming out shortly” should give an indication at least of how that is going.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · December 17, 2022

14. The Multiple Streams Framework and Civil Affairs Operations

Interesting analysis. Should provoke thoughtful and useful discussion among strategists and campaign planners.

Please go to the link to view the graphics. https://www.civilaffairsassoc.org/post/the-multiple-streams-framework-and-civil-affairs-operations

I like the "garbage can model of policy analysis."

I have to take a slight exception to his description of unconventional warfare. Like most people he focuses on the guerrilla aspect. I would argue that in modern unconventional warfare the most important element may be the underground because it is really the key element that can influence the political objectives.

Excerpt:

UW typically entails the use of guerilla forces to conduct limited disruption attacks.

But he goes on to describe how UW can be conducted to achieve political objectives with relative violence.

The Multiple Streams Framework and Civil Affairs Operations

civilaffairsassoc.org · December 18, 2022

(Figure 1 Photo provided by Pexels.com)

By Alan Goodman

Introduction

In the late 1990s, Yugoslavian president, Slobodan Milosevic, denied the results of parliamentary elections, attempted to control all aspects of the country's higher education, and enacted policies to move the country closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. The region was still in the midst of the Yugoslav Wars, and the national mood would no longer tolerate the oppression of an authoritarian regime. For many, the desired way forward for the country was to determine their national leaders through legitimate democratic practices. The combination of a rising despot, a national mood tired of conflict, and a vision of a clear path forward opened a window of opportunity for activists to form an organization named Otpor!. Otpor! launched a series of non-violent resistance campaigns resulting in the overthrow of Milosevic.[i] Civil Affairs (CA) practitioners studying Otpor!’s resistance can analyze the three conditions outlined above (a dictatorship problem, opposing national politics, and a proposed solution) by mirroring the three streams of what is known as the multiple streams framework of policy analysis; the problems, the politics, and the solutions.[ii] Utilizing this framework can assist CA in leveraging indigenous populations and institutions to win without fighting.

How does a Policy Analysis Framework assist Civil Affairs?

How does a policy analysis tool help CA forces affect an enemy outside of kinetic operations? Thomas Birkland defines a policy as "what a government intends to do about a public problem."[iii] When an American thinks of policy analysis, what may first come to mind are debates and studies conducted by official experts pertaining to domestic issues, not countering threats to the nation. However, what from an American point of view is a foreign policy issue is more often than not an indigenous policy issue that creates violent conditions within an operating environment.

CA engage and leverage the civil component of an operational environment to deter threats while enhancing governance.[iv] As the Department of Defense’s governance experts, it is essential for CA Forces to understand how governments, or organizations conducting governance, make decisions to solve their problems. It is crucial because CA units can fall victim to putting the cart before the horse. Civic action programs, humanitarian assistance, or digging wells are stereotypical civil affairs operations meant to help a government solve its problems. While these approaches may be applicable in certain situations, more often than not, they are uncreative examples of applying a tactic without the proper analysis. This often results in minimal to no effect on an enemy or, in the worst case, a loss of rapport with a local population or institution to the enemy’s benefit. Applying a policy analysis framework to CA operations (CAO), which other experts use to study governance decisions and problems, equips CA forces with the proper tools to determine the best method to attack a problem set. Utilizing a policy analysis method gives CA practitioners a flexible framework to attack an enemy that is not dependent on specific tactics, focuses on a mission, and encourages constructive creativity.

What is the Multiple Streams Framework?

The multiple streams framework is a simple, organized, and visual model that can easily nest within the military decision-making process (MDMP). The multiple streams framework was derived from the earlier garbage can model of policy analysis. The garbage can model stated that an organization's decision-making process was not formed from a logical process of solving well-defined problems but through merging unrelated problems and solutions. Essentially decisions are only made after every variable is gathered and considered independent of each other.[v] The garbage can model mirrors how CA currently plans operations. Information is gathered and then consolidated in a format that organizes and states the information (PMESII-PT/ASCOPE crosswalk, civil considerations paragraph, Annex K), but deciding on a course of action is ultimately left up to an individual’s ability to analyze and understand every piece of information individually.

Figure 2 Garbage Can Model of policy analysis[vi]

John Kingdon studied federal health and transportation policy and refined the garbage can model into the multiple streams framework. Instead of every piece of information that influences a policy issue being considered on its own, Kingdon divided them into three streams: the problem stream, the political stream, and the policy stream. These streams are leveraged by policy entrepreneurs who converge on a policy window that results in a policy output.[vii]

Figure 3 Multiple Streams Framework[viii]

The problem stream of the framework consists of the various issues that a group of people and their government want addressed. Security, health, food availability, and many other issues can be addressed in this stream by plugging in many of the tools CA already uses. For the CA practitioner, the problem stream also includes the problem that their mission is intended to address, the enemy. The policy stream constitutes all possible solutions to solve the issues in the problem stream. The word policy can be substituted for a solution, project, or program for CA forces. Kingdon describes the politics stream as influenced by the national mood, pressure groups, and legislative turnover. Kingdon’s original three parameters are based on an American political environment, but the politics stream can take on many characteristics in the context of civil affairs operations. The politics stream is where the cultural information gathered through mission analysis and civil reconnaissance is applied. The policy window is a critical point in time when a policy, or course of action, is amicable with the political atmosphere to solve a problem. Policy entrepreneurs are those who recognize the critical junction in time and take advantage of the opportunity to turn the three streams into a policy output.[ix] CA Forces are entrepreneurs, but they are not the only ones. An enemy, allies, NGOs, or completely neutral parties can all act as entrepreneurs. In a CA practitioner's case, the policy output is the desired outcome of a course of action. In the example at the beginning of this essay, the organization Otpor! were the entrepreneurs who recognized that the political atmosphere allowed them to enact non-violent resistance to unseat their problem: Slobodan Milosevic.

The multiple streams framework’s primary advantage for CA is assisting the practitioner in determining what course of action best aligns with the political and cultural atmosphere at a given time. The framework is adaptable and not tied to a specific condition of the operating environment. Adaptability prevents copy-and-paste tactics, techniques, and procedures, while refining more effective methods of incurring costs on an enemy. As a force that deals with the human terrain, it is vital for CA forces to understand that political will and social movements are rarely created out of thin air, and the multiple streams framework assists CA practitioners in identifying how to take advantage of the political atmosphere they find themselves in.

Case Studies

To understand how the multiple streams framework applies to civil affairs operations, below are a few examples of its application. A few different types of conditions that CA may encounter are represented. It is important to note that the intent of the policy entrepreneur in each example may not live up to the values and ethics that American Civil Affairs are expected to uphold. The examples are, however, successful applications of the framework that produced effects on an enemy without actually fighting and present valuable lessons to learn.

Counter Insurgency: After World War II, the Philippines became an independent nation that had to figure out how various ethnic groups form a cohesive nation after a legacy of centuries of colonization. Creating a new nation is difficult, and not every member of a new country may be satisfied with the newly formed government. In the Philippines, the Hukbalahaps, a Marxist group of farmers from Luzon, were unsatisfied with the new Filipino government. The Hukbalahaps were a guerrilla group that fought the Japanese occupation in World War II and then fought the Filipino government in what is known as the Huk Rebellion.[x]

In 1950 the Filipino president requested then Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Philippines, to assist in countering the rebellion. Lansdale's problem, within the policy stream, was straightforward; the Hukbalahaps were attacking the Filipino government and soldiers. To most observers, the obvious solution, or policies in the policy stream, would be to counterattack the Hukbalahaps. The political stream, however, was more complex than the problem or policy streams. Many Filipinos admired the Hukbalahaps because they saw them as targeting privileged elites and standing for the average citizen. Increasing violence against the Hukbalahaps could increase general resistance to the Filipino government. The political stream for Lansdale included the Filipino locals' general feelings and what was important to the Hukbalahaps. As farmers, the land was precious to them, and access to it was difficult when under pressure from government troops. The Hukbalahaps also had a motto meant to appeal to the average Filipino of “land for the landless.” Lansdale, the policy entrepreneur, recognized the window of opportunity and enacted a policy of resettling Hukbalahaps who defected onto farms up to twenty acres in size. The output was Huckbalahaps voluntarily surrendering in search of a new farm, taking themselves off the battlefield, and reducing the number of guerillas attacking the government.[xi]

Insurgency: The multiple streams framework can also be applied to the insurgents themselves. The Islamic State’s affiliate in Sahelian Africa, ISGS (The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara), had a problem in its early days of formation: it had to recruit members and supporters. In the early 2010s, Jihadism spread rapidly across West Africa following the toppling of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Instability in Libya enflamed ethnic tensions across the Sahel, causing local violent extremist groups to appear. A multitude of jihadist groups coopted these indigenous organizations triggering the formation of named terrorist groups.[xii] This included Al-Qa’ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), and ISGS.[xiii]

Amongst this crowded jihadist space, ISGS’s problem stream was how to recruit support, especially with the decline of IS main in Iraq and Syria. Their political stream was punctuated by ethnic tensions, particularly the violence between the Tuaregs and Fulani along the Niger-Mali border. Many of the Tuaregs were already affiliated with other groups, while the Fulani were a generally marginalized population across West Africa. ISGS, the entrepreneur, in this case, recognized the window of opportunity and filled their policy stream with promises of protection, Fulani youth engagement, and by marrying into Fulani families. The output was an increase in Fulani recruits to ISGS. So much so that the Fulani referred to ISGS as their "Saviors" and nicknamed their ISGS leadership as "Higo," friend in Fulfulde.[xiv]

Unconventional Warfare: When a state takes up activities to enable a resistance movement that coerces, disrupts, or overthrows a government in a denied area, they are conducting unconventional warfare (UW).[xv] UW typically entails the use of guerilla forces to conduct limited disruption attacks. In 2014, Russia successfully coerced and overthrew the local Crimean government with relatively little violence.

After the Euromaidan uprising, where Ukrainian demonstrations led to the resignation of pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, Russia perceived a threat to their security. From the Russian perspective, Euromaidan was reminiscent of the color revolutions across the globe that Russian leaders believe are influenced by western governments. Russia's problem stream was that a successful color revolution in Ukraine could threaten Russian interests (in hindsight, as of the writing of this essay, a large-scale military operation in Ukraine would be a costly policy solution).[xvi]

In 2014 Russia instead examined its politics stream and how Russia and Ukraine have shared histories and ethnicities. Crimea, and all of Ukraine, have been under the control of Russia in some form in the past. Russia, the entrepreneur, saw an opportunity to choose a strategy in their policy stream that took advantage of their shared ties without having to launch an all-out invasion. Russian government officials encouraged pro-Russian politicians in Crimea’s Rada, the local legislative body, and pro-Russian political parties to hold a series of votes and referendums to change the Crimean government and eventually reunite with Russia. When a manufactured vote did not go Moscow's way they employed mysterious soldiers, later identified as Russian special operations, for intimidation. The output of this framework was that the pro-Russian politicians had internationally justified the annexation of Crimea into Russia with relatively little need for large-scale combat operations.[xvii]

Application

The examples mentioned earlier are great for understanding how the multiple streams framework can be seen in different situations, but it is unlikely that those policy entrepreneurs consciously applied the framework to their operations. The framework can, however, be adapted by CA forces to the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP). The framework must be adapted to the MDMP process, not an additional proprietary CA format. Unique CA analysis and planning frameworks that have been applied in the past were not understood by personnel outside of Civil Affairs as non-Civil Affairs personnel were not trained on those processes. However, MDMP and its big brother, the Joint Operations Planning Process (JOPP), are already universal languages across the joint force. The multiple streams framework nests well with the MDMP process because it already nests within policy analysis processes, such as the "Eightfold Path," which closely mirrors the seven steps in MDMP.[xviii]

Instead of using the multiple streams framework separately or clumsily shoehorning it into MDMP, the framework should be used as a guide for course of action (COA) development, analysis, and comparison. Specifically, the framework should be a guide when creating evaluation criteria. The first two steps in MDMP are receiving (Initiating planning in JOPP) and analyzing the mission that has been given. Steps three through six are COA development, COA Analysis, COA Comparison, and COA approval, with the final seventh step being orders production.[xix]

Figure 4 The seven steps of the Military Decision-Making Process[xx]

During COA development, a CA planner establishes evaluation criteria based on the commander's guidance to measure the effectiveness of draft courses of action against each other during COA analysis. The evaluation criteria are then plugged into a decision matrix that assigns a numerical value to the subjective criteria during COA comparison. The values for criteria are next added up during COA comparison for the various draft COAs. The final scores are used to recommend a final course of action during COA approval.[xxi] Once again, the framework continues to be applicable because the policies that the multiple streams framework would address in a non-military context are also evaluated with a similar outcomes matrix with assigned criteria.[xxii]

Figure 5 Example standard decision matrix.[xxiii]

The streams from the multiple streams framework are applied as the evaluation criteria. The entrepreneur is already established as the organization planning through the MDMP process (CA forces), and the desired outcome is already established through the mission, purpose, intent, and end state.

Figure 6 Example decision matrix incorporating the multiple streams framework.

The example decision matrix above conceptualizes the multiple streams framework as evaluation criteria. The criteria are subdivided based on the details of the mission but under the categories of the three streams before being scored.

Figure 7 Example multiple streams framework-based decision matrix with example courses of action based on the Huk Rebellion

Here is a simple decision matrix using fictional COAs that could have been applied to the example of the Huk Rebellion mentioned earlier. COA 1 represents the actual guerrilla farming resettlement program that was implemented. COA 2 is a military counterattack on the Hukbalahaps. COA 3 is an agricultural civil action program for the local population that is reminiscent of what a CA team may employ today. In this instance, criteria under the problem stream must reduce attacks on the Filipino government while strengthening a US ally in the Pacific. The politics stream's criteria must address land issues and the public's view on government elitism. While the solutions/policies stream must address what resources are available and the speed of implementation.

For simplicity, in this example, a higher score means that the COA is more favorable. It is also appropriate to score a decision matrix with a lower score determining a COA recommendation. As there are three COAs, they are scored one through three on how well they address each stream. Weights are applied to each stream based on a commander's guidance and multiplied by each score. In this example, the politics stream is given a weight of two, although the priority may change based on the situation.

Here COA 1 scored high in its ability to address the problem and politics streams but the lowest in solutions/policy streams because of its resource intensiveness. COA 2 scores the highest in the solutions/policy stream as the Filipino Army was already available and could be quickly employed. COA 2 scores a medium on the problem stream as it does not address long-term issues with the Hukbalahaps and scores the lowest in the political stream as there is a potential to negatively affect the local perceptions of the government. COA 3 scored in the middle on the politics stream, addressing the assigned criteria at least with a civilian population. COA 3 also scored in the middle on the solutions/policy stream, as resources are generally available for such a program. However, COA 3 scored the lowest in the problem stream as there are no guarantees that it will affect the guerillas. When the points are added up, COA 1 comes away with the high score and is the course of action that proved successful.

Reducing the multiple streams framework into a few criteria may seem to be a massive simplification of the concept, but the concept is intended to be simple and therefore adaptable to a broad range of situations. For the Civil Affairs Soldier or Marine, comprehending the overall concept of the framework ensures that they understand how governance decisions are made. Using the framework to set criteria creates a planning guide that ensures they choose appropriate courses of action to affect an enemy. Distilling the framework into criteria on a decision matrix guarantees that the reasoning behind a course of action can be explained to anyone across the joint force when conducting multi-domain operations (MDO).

Conclusion

Any serious student of policy formation would quickly point out that the application of the multiple streams framework and the policy analysis process presented in this writing does not line up precisely with how a professional bureaucrat or consultant would employ them. However, any service member that studies policy would be remiss not to notice the similarities between the military and civilian formal processes of solving a government problem. Often an operation starts with the good intentions of addressing civil considerations and accomplishing lofty strategic goals. The easy solution, for both CA and other forces, is to do what they have always done, whether or not it is the best path forward. Tactical competence must be aligned with operational and strategic goals.[xxiv] Civil Affairs are best employed as tactical elements to address operational and strategic objectives. Utilizing the civilian multiple streams framework within MDMP compels CA forces to focus on civilian and governance-based solutions that achieve those strategic objectives.

American Civil Affairs are far from the only ones looking to win without fighting. China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has coined the term "non-military war operations.” Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the PLA state that the concept of non-military war operations extend the understanding of war to every facet of the human experience.[xxv] This concept, coined in 1999, can be seen as the genesis for the gray zone operations, competition below the level of armed conflict, which punctuates the coming era of great power competition. The multiple streams framework is meant to be adaptable, as highlighted by the diversity in the examples mentioned previously. This will prove vital as Civil Affairs wades into the uncharted waters of winning without fighting in the gray zone, under the shadow of great power competition. As B. A. Friedman stated in his book On Tactics: "Overwhelming military success once was enough to bridge the gaps between tactics and policy…Military success alone is no longer enough…."[xxvi]

About the Author: Alan Goodman is a Civil Affairs Special Operations Governance Officer currently pursuing a Master's in Public Policy at American University in Washington, DC. Alan served in the 91st CA BN (SO) (A) and commanded Civil Military Support Elements in East and West Africa.

Disclaimer: The opinions, conclusions and recommendations expressed or implied above are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any organization or any entity of the U.S. government.

Figures:

Figure 1 Photo provided by Pexels.com.. 1

Figure 2 Garbage Can Model of policy analysis. 3

Figure 3 Multiple Streams Framework. 3

Figure 4 The seven steps of the Military Decision-Making Process. 7

Figure 5 Example standard decision matrix. 7

Figure 6 Example decision matrix incorporating the multiple streams framework. 8

Figure 7 Example multiple streams framework-based decision matrix with example courses of action based on the Huk Rebellion8

[i] Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015), 7. [ii] Nikolaos Zahariadis, “Multiple Streams Framework; Structure, Limitations, Prospects,” in Theories of the Policy Process (New York: Routledge, 2007), 71. [iii] Thomas Birkland, An Introduction to the Policy Process (New York: Routledge, 2016), 9. [iv] FM 3-57 Civil Affairs Operations (Washington DC: Department of the Army, 2021), 1-1. [v] David L. Weimer and Aidan R. Vinning Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice sixth edition (New York: Routledge, 2017), 267-268. [vi] Einsiedel Jr., A. A. (1983). Decision-making and problem-solving skills: the rational versus the garbage can model of decision-making. Project Management Quarterly, 14(4), 52–57. [vii] Weimer, 267-268. [viii] Zahariadis, 71. [ix] Zahariadis, 71-74. [x] Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation), 104-117. [xi] Boot, 101-129. [xii] Mark Moyar, Countering Violence Extremism in Mali (MacDill AFB: Joint Special Operations University), 21-41. [xiii] Jason Warner, Ryan O’Farrell, Heni Nsaibia, and Ryan Cummings, the Islamic State in Africa; The Emergence, Evolution, and Future of the Next Jihadist Battlefront (New York: Oxford University Press), 26-27. [xiv] Warner, 182-183. [xv] Joint Publication 3-05, Special Operations (Washington DC: US Department of Defense, 2018), 11-9. [xvi] Kent DeBendictis, Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’ and the Annexation of Crimea: The Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 31-179. [xvii] DeBendictis, 31-179. [xviii] Eugene Bardach, Eric M. Patashnik A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving (Los Angeles: Sage, 2016), xvi. [xix] FM 6-0 Commander and Staff Organization and Operations (Washington DC: Department of the Army, 2018), 9-2. [xx] “About the Military Decision-making Process (MDMP),” the Lightning Press, 16 September 2022, https://www.thelightningpress.com/about-the-military-decisionmaking-process-mdmp/ [xxi] Joint operations Planning Process (JOPP) Workbook (Newport: Naval War College, 2013), 4-5 to 5-3. [xxii] Bardach, 41-63. [xxiii]FM 6-0 Commander and Staff Organization and Operations, 9-40. [xxiv] Mick Ryan, War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2022), 151. [xxv] Qio Liang, Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare: Translated from the Original People’s Liberation Army Documents (Echo Point Books), 38. [xxvi] BA. Friedman On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2017), 143.

civilaffairsassoc.org · December 18, 2022

15. Biden official told members of Congress that Ukraine has ability to retake Crimea

Biden official told members of Congress that Ukraine has ability to retake Crimea

No offensive is imminent, but officials worry that a large-scale attack that threatens Russia’s hold on the peninsula could push Putin to use nuclear weapons.

NBC News · by Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce · December 16, 2022

A Biden administration official recently told members of Congress that Ukraine has the military capability to retake Crimea, but some officials are concerned any large-scale offensive that threatens Russia’s hold on the peninsula could push Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons, say two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The late November Ukraine briefing to some members of Congress included discussion of the reasons Ukraine will continue to need U.S. weapons and equipment for the foreseeable future. The two officials said a Biden official, when asked during the briefing about continued support for the Ukrainian military and whether it would try to retake Crimea, responded that Ukraine now has the ability to take it back.

Asked about the response, a U.S. official said Ukraine has no near-term objective to retake Crimea and that a military offensive is not imminent but did acknowledge that Ukraine has shown resilience and perseverance throughout the war. Administration officials say they believe three recent deadly drone strikes against Russian military bases were carried out by Ukrainians, although they say it’s still not clear whether the Zelenskyy government ordered them directly.

Washington and other governments have provided Kyiv with more powerful weapons, including HIMARS artillery, that have inflicted serious damage on Russian forces. U.S. and Western perceptions of Ukraine’s armed forces have changed since the February invasion, when U.S. and European officials worried Russian troops and tanks would crush their adversaries in a matter of days or weeks. Senior U.S. military officers and Western governments say Ukraine has shown ingenuity and grit in fighting a larger, better-armed military and quickly incorporated new weapons systems provided by NATO members.

The Ukrainians “continue to shock the world with how well they’re performing on the battlefield,” a U.S. official said.

Russian President Putin drives across Crimea bridge targeted by bomb

Dec. 5, 202201:00

The Biden official’s apparent confidence in Ukraine’s capabilities comes as the administration debates whether to grant the continued requests of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government for more powerful weaponry, like ATACMS missile systems and tanks, and as Ukraine says Russia is preparing to send 200,000 fresh troops to attack Kyiv.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment.

‘The red line’

No Ukrainian offensive in Crimea is believed to be imminent, officials and experts say, mainly because the current fight does not support it.

Ukraine is struggling and has lost some ground around Bakhmut in the east. The two sides are in a virtual standstill there, and U.S. officials assess that based on where the Ukrainian troops and battlefield lines are now, the Ukrainian military will move northeast in the coming months, rather than south to Crimea.

“A lot would have to happen militarily first” before Ukraine could begin a real offensive to retake Crimea, a U.S. official said.

Some administration officials, however, are privately discussing what could happen if Ukraine launches an offensive into Crimea, which Russia has held since 2014, and U.S. officials are concerned Putin could feel backed into a corner.

“Putin may react more strongly to Crimea,” a U.S. official said.

The destroyed Antonovsky bridge, which was the only transportation route from Kherson to Crimea.Metin Atkas / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A central concern is that a real threat to Russian control could push Putin to use a dirty bomb or other nuclear device, one former and two current officials said. “That’s the red line,” a former U.S. official said.

Three U.S. officials stressed that the U.S. has not seen any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb right now.

In addition, a real fight for Crimea would include heavy battlefield losses on both sides, and taking it back would be a daunting task for Ukrainian forces because of the heavy Russian military presence and the difficult geography, military experts say. Bloody battles were fought over the area in the Russia civil war and World War II.

The peninsula, which juts south into the Black Sea, is connected to mainland Ukraine by a narrow isthmus. Russia has up to 70,000 troops defending the peninsula’s northern approaches, and they are dug in, two U.S. officials said.

Ukraine lacks sufficient airborne or naval forces that could launch effective attacks against the dug-in forces.

The Ukrainians would have better prospects attacking other Russian targets on the mainland in eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops are more exposed, experts and a U.S. official said.

If Ukraine made more advances against Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine, it could be better placed to eventually strike at Crimea, experts and a U.S. official said.

Unclaimed attacks

Some Biden administration officials are already concerned about continued Ukrainian strikes inside Russia that could provoke a stronger response from Putin and spread the conflict to Ukraine’s neighbors.

A series of unclaimed attacks have targeted Russian forces in Crimea since July, including a drone strike that hit Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol and explosions at a suspected Russian ammunition dump. In October, Ukraine indirectly claimed credit for damaging the Kerch Bridge in eastern Crimea, which connects it to mainland Russia.

Russia blaming Ukraine for deadly drone attacks

Dec. 7, 202201:35

While administration officials believe Ukrainians carried out the three recent drone strikes against Russian bases, they don’t think they were made with drones provided by the U.S.

The White House was surprised by the strikes, two U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official said, creating a moment of frustration with the government in Kyiv, as occurred after the Kerch Bridge attack and the killing of the daughter of a close Putin ally. But other officials said that the frustration has been going on since the invasion and that in some cases it helps the U.S. to have plausible deniability about an incident.

U.S. officials concede that Ukraine has taken a series of escalatory actions against Russia without informing the U.S. or Western allies in advance.

A U.S. official said Ukraine does make its own battlefield decisions, but the White House is confident that Ukraine would not begin an extensive operation like re-taking Crimea without notifying the U.S. in advance.

Attacks deep inside Russian territory, which the Kremlin has blamed on Ukraine, have also raised concerns in Washington and European capitals that Kyiv could overplay its hand and provoke more escalatory action from Russia and derail any chance of peace talks, Western officials said.

Nuclear tensions with Russia spiked in October, but they have since calmed considerably, the officials said, and there are no U.S. intelligence assessments that Putin plans to use a nuclear weapon at this time.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, held a closed briefing for House members on Ukraine on Thursday morning.

Carol E. Lee

Carol E. Lee is an NBC News correspondent.

Courtney Kube

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Dan De Luce

Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

NBC News · by Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce · December 16, 2022

16. The New Battle for the Arctic

Why do we seem so behind in this critical national security issue? Is it because of the association with climate change? Have the politics of clmate change blinded us to opportunity and threats in this region?

The New Battle for the Arctic

Politico · by Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs

Magazine

Climate change is opening the Arctic. Can the U.S. and NATO surpass Russian capabilities and ambitions in a new Cold War?

Mainland Svalbard looking west across Isfjorden, Oct. 18, 2022. | Ola Lewitschnik for POLITICO

By Kenneth R. Rosen

12/17/2022 09:16 AM EST

Kenneth R. Rosen is an independent journalist based in Italy and the author, most recently, of .

SVALBARD, Norway — In January, when an undersea telecommunications cable connecting this far-flung Arctic archipelago to mainland Norway and the rest of Europe was damaged, Norwegian officials called to port the only fishing vessel for miles, a Russian trawler. Police in the northern city of Tromsø interviewed the crew and carried out an investigation into the incident, which was seen as a major threat to the security of Norway and other nations, including the United States. Had there not been a back-up cable, the damage would have severed internet to the world’s largest satellite relay, one that connects the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA and other government agencies from around the world to real-time space surveillance.

The investigation’s findings were inconclusive, if worrisome. Something “man-made” had damaged the cable, but Norwegian police could not prove the Russian fishing vessel was responsible, authorities told me. The police allowed the fishing boat crew to return to their ship and set back out to sea.

When I sat down in October with the governor of Svalbard, Lars Fause, he told me people here in the high north accept this sort of geopolitical intrigue as part of life. (He also stressed that nothing of value was lost when the cable was cut and the damage was repaired quickly.) Several Norwegian analysts and local journalists covering the Arctic told me they believed the Russians were behind the damage, and that they had damaged the cable as payback for Norway’s continued tracking of Russia’s newly upgraded nuclear submarine fleet that patrols this region. The Russian embassy in Oslo did not respond to request for comment.

“Everything we do is to keep good order at sea,” Rear Admiral Rune Andersen, the head of the Norwegian Navy and Coast Guard told me, weeks later. He said he’s seen an increase of both international commercial and specifically Russian naval maritime activity in the Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea over the last five years. Andersen says the Norwegian fleet has devoted new resources to underwater monitoring, aerial shipping lane surveillance and intelligence sharing with other Arctic nations like Sweden. “We’ve been improving to make sure we’ve control over the North Atlantic. What happens now in the North is important. It has a direct effect on security elsewhere.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the Arctic has largely been free of visible geopolitical conflict. In 1996, the eight countries with Arctic territory formed the Arctic Council, where they agreed to environmental protection standards and pooled technology and money for joint natural resources extraction in the region. Svalbard, Europe’s northernmost inhabited settlement, just 700 miles south of the North Pole, perfectly represents this spirit of cooperation. While a territory of Norway, it is also a kind of international Arctic station. It hosts the KSAT Satellite Station, relied on by everyone from the U.S. to China; a constellation of some dozen nations’ research laboratories; and the world’s doomsday Seed Vault (where seeds from around the world are stored in case of a global loss in crop diversity, whether due to climate change or nuclear fallout). Svalbard, where polar bears outnumber people, is considered a demilitarized, visa-free zone by 42 nations.

But today, this Arctic desert is rapidly becoming the center of a new conflict. The vast sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is melting rapidly due to climate change, losing 13 percent per decade — a rate that experts say could make the Arctic ice-free in the summer as soon as 2035. Already, the thaw has created new shipping lanes, opened existing seasonal lanes for more of the year and provided more opportunities for natural resource extraction. Nations are now vying for military and commercial control over this newly accessible territory — competition that has only gotten more intense since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

For the past two decades, Russia has been dominating this fight for the Arctic, building up its fleet of nuclear-capable icebreakers, ships and submarines, developing more mining and oil well operations along its 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline, racing to capture control of the new “Northern Sea Route” or “Transpolar Sea Route” which could begin to open up by 2035, and courting non-Arctic nations to help fund those endeavors.

At the same time, America is playing catch-up in a climate where it has little experience and capabilities. The U.S. government and military seems to be awakening to the threats of climate change and Russian dominance of the Arctic — recently issuing a National Strategy for the Arctic Region and a report on how climate change impacts American military bases, opening a consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, and appointing this year an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic region within the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and Global Resilience. America’s European allies, too, have been rethinking homeland security, increasing national defense budgets and security around critical energy infrastructure in the Arctic as they aim to boost their defense capabilities and rely less on American assistance.

But 17 Arctic watchers — including Norwegian diplomats, State Department analysts and national security experts focusing on the Arctic — said they fear that the U.S. and Europe won’t be able to maintain a grip on the region’s energy resources and diplomacy as Russia places more civilian and military infrastructure across the Arctic, threatening the economic development and national security of the seven other nations whose sovereign land sits within the Arctic Circle.

Even as the U.S. says it has developed stronger Arctic policies, five prominent Arctic watchers I spoke with say that the U.S. government and military are taking too narrow a view, seeing the Arctic as primarily Alaska and an area for natural resource extraction, but not as a key geopolitical and national security battleground beyond U.S. borders. They say the U.S. is both poorly resourced in the Arctic and unprepared to deal with the rising climate threat, which will require new kinds of technology, training and infrastructure the U.S. has little experience with. Several U.S. government officials involved in Arctic planning told me in private they also fear a nuclear escalation in the Arctic, which would threaten to engulf Europe and its allies in a larger conflict.

“We’re committed to expanding our engagement across the region,” one of those officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about a tense geopolitical region, told me, “but we’re not there yet.”

“The [Defense] Department views the Arctic as a potential avenue of approach to the homeland, and as a potential venue for great power competition,” America’s new deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and Global Resilience, Iris A. Ferguson, wrote me in an email. Ferguson described Russia as an “acute threat” and also outlined fears that China, a “pacing threat” was seeking “to normalize its presence and pursue a larger role in shaping Arctic regional governance and security affairs.” (China has contributed to liquid natural gas projects and funded a biodiesel plant in Finland as part of its Belt and Road Initiative now reaching the Arctic.)

There have been moments of tensions in the Arctic over the past few decades, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has sent the competition to new highs. Right after the invasion, the seven other Arctic Council members said they would boycott upcoming talks in Russia. Norway, considered NATO’s northern listening post, curbed access to its ports for Russian fishing trawlers, but still allowed for Russian fishing in the Barents Sea. In May, Russia declared a militarization of its fishing fleet and maritime vessels. Norway moved to heighten alertness at military installations and critical liquid gas and energy infrastructure across the country, much of which sits in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Europe, which severed ties with Russian gas exports, has come to rely on that Arctic energy.

In mid-November, U.S. Special Forces demonstrated the use of an experimental guided weapons system deployed by parachute over Norwegian territory. “We’re trying to deter Russian aggression, expansionist behavior, by showing enhanced capabilities of the allies,” Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Melnicoff told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

In Norway’s High North, a term used to describe the Norwegian Arctic territories, no fewer than seven Russian citizens have been detained over the last few months for flying drones, prohibited under the same bans for Russian airlines in European airspace. The drones were discovered flying near areas of critical infrastructure. One of those arrested in October was Andrey Yakunin, 47, the son of Vladimir Yakunin, the former president of Russian Railways and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the State Department after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Since Russia’s invasion “we were reminded of a local historical realization, which comes a few times in every generation, that things can get much worse than you thought,” Espen Barth Eide, the former Norwegian defense minister told me. “It’s much easier [for Russia] to meddle if you have an area of uncertainty between the West and Russia,” Barth Eide said of the waters around Norway, whose fisheries are often contested by Russia.

“The Arctic, at least as an area of security issues, hasn’t been on the agenda since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Commander Göran Swistek, international security visiting fellow at the German Institute for International Security Affairs, who authored a study about Russia’s growing interest in the north, told me in a phone interview. “But the northern area has again become a new frontline where Russia feels it’s vulnerable.”

Meanwhile, Svalbard — equidistant to the northernmost American and Russian military installations, standing directly along a sea route which would bring the Russian Navy’s Second Fleet skirting past on its way to any number of East Coast metropolises — navigates a tightrope of rivalry and cooperation with Russia. After most nations shuttered diplomatic channels after the invasion, Norway is perhaps the only nation with a direct link, through Skype, to the Russian military.

When I was in Svalbard in October, Russia was preparing exercises in the Arctic for its nuclear forces and, U.S. officials said, nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. And yet Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told an audience at Nord University in Northern Norway in late-October: “We see no signs of an increased security threat in the North.”

Ahead of those Russian military exercises and on the day of Yakunin’s arrest, I stood on the stern of the Polargirl, a red and white multipurpose frigate as ice clinked against its hull. We had just departed Esmark glacier, its facade a weeping puerile blue, and would soon dock at the small Russian mining settlement of Barentsburg, once a jewel of the Soviet Union now frozen in time. The Polargirl listed port to starboard, bow to stern, in a gentle roll across Isfjorden in what is known in Norwegian as tung sjø, or heavy and troubled seas. Ahead I could only see swatches of gray, a horizon crowned in craggy mountains. To the east was Russia, carrying out nuclear testing. To the west, nations fought — most often silently — to hold the line at what I heard more than once referred to as the “new ice curtain.”

Barentsburg sits on a western inlet of the Isfjorden, near where it opens into the Barents Sea. Many of the roughly 400 inhabitants are contract workers for Trust Arktikugol, a Russian state-owned mining and tourism company, and hail from across the Ukraine’s mining belt, the Donbass.

Barentsburg was once the idealized Russian society. Stalin’s “Red Arctic” propaganda and similar messages promoted under Soviet rule glorified the Arctic as Russia’s heartland, its eternal dream. A sign in the town square, a holdover from colder times, reads “Communism is our Goal.” In the Barentsburg schoolhouse, murals depict towering trees in bright colors reaching toward a celestial sky.

In Greek mythology, the Arctic was known as Hyperborea, a utopia home to an immortal race who lived within reach of the gods. There the climate was temperate, with white swans gliding across unfrozen lakes and poplar trees that dripped amber beneath a yearlong sun bringing abundant harvests. In Russian nationalist ideology, Russians are the natural successors to the hyperboreans. Putin himself has said that the region is “a concentration of practically all aspects of national security — military, political, economic, technological, environmental and that of resources.” About 2.4 million Russians already live in the Arctic, meaning Russian citizens comprise more than half of the global Arctic population. Russian coastline accounts for 53 percent of global Arctic Ocean coastline. And 10 percent of the national GDP and 20 percent of Russia’s exports lie within the Arctic Circle. Not long ago, Moscow State University academics sought to rename the North Polar Sea the “Russian Ocean.”

That pursuit takes on a new urgency today. Russia remains existentially threatened by thawing permafrost, atop which some 60 percent of its civilian and energy sector infrastructure sits unstable, so Russia is trying to find new ways to reshape the region in its favor before it reshapes the country. And the Kremlin’s losses in Ukraine (together with the sanctions pressuring its economy) are forcing it to look for dominance and control elsewhere, according to Andreas Osthagen, a senior research fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo.

As much as Russia admires the region, its approach to developing and maintaining the Arctic has been aggressive, if not disastrous. Russia has been mining and drilling in the Siberian stretches of the Arctic for years. In 2020, Putin declared a state of emergency in a region of northern Siberia where a river was turned crimson after what the Kremlin called the “world’s largest” Arctic oil spill. Lack of regulations and an emphasis on profit over safety and environmental protection have led to a handful of similar disasters in recent years. Each year about 18,000 residents leave the Russian Arctic while three quarters of the Russian defense budget (about $1.9 billion) went to expansion in the same region. Cities like Murmansk offer military employees in the country’s north twice the annual median income. Military personnel are now the region’s main taxpayers.

In August, Moscow pledged 1.5 billion rubles (about $23,986,500) for Barentsburg and the nearby Soviet-era settlement of Pyramiden to rebuild public infrastructure. According to Alexei Chekunkov, the minister of the Russian Federation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, the raised funds will be used not to maintain coal production but to develop and encourage tourism and facilitate the transition to renewable energy. Timofey Rogozin, the former top Russian tourism official in Barentsburg, who now lives in nearby Longyearbyen, told me this is an attempt to maintain Russia’s realm of influence on Svalbard.

Where other countries have only recently begun seeing the Arctic as a new front in Russia’s war on the West, Russia has seen it that way for decades. Over the past eight years, Moscow has reopened and modernized upwards of 50 Cold War-era bases along the necklace of its 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline. Russian forces patrol the country’s Northern Sea Route off the southeastern coast of Svalbard, conducting sporadic military testing which inconveniences Norwegian fishing vessels. Russian forces also taunt American maritime vessels off Alaska’s coast. In 2018, during the Trident Juncture NATO exercises, Russia was accused of jamming GPS signals in and above the waters off the Kola Peninsula in the Barents Sea. Its use of asymmetric warfare in gray-zone battlegrounds — from military GPS jamming to embedding spies in research institutes — in the Arctic is well-documented.

“This idea about hybrid threats has really risen,” Marisol Maddox, an Arctic analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington told me by phone days before Yakunin’s arrest for piloting a drone around critical infrastructure. “That’s where the Arctic comes in, where we’re concerned about certain types of infrastructure. Russia’s not wanting to engage in another theater. They’re already overextended in Ukraine, but they then are more likely to utilize these tactics that fall just below the threshold of kinetic warfare.”

“The Barents Sea is, I believe, one of the world’s most dangerous hotspots,” Tormod Heier, a researcher at the Norwegian Defence University College, told me. The nuclear submarines and Russia’s Second Fleet, based nearby, “are the most crucial instrument for Putin in terms of having some kind of parity with the United States in the international arena.”

Across the seas, the Arctic remains a vexatious place for American military planners. America’s Arctic territory mainly lies in Alaska, which has more than 34,000 miles of coastline and houses five U.S. military bases. The U.S. only has one other Arctic base, Thule Air Base in Greenland.

The experts I spoke with told me that America’s basic Arctic military and commercial readiness can use a lot of improvement. America has only two icebreakers, the boats that make it possible for military and commercial vessels to navigate frozen waterways. The U.S. has plans to build six more, while Canada has 18 and Russia has more than 50. The U.S. does not operate any Arctic deep-water ports — necessary for stationing larger military and logistics vessels — in Alaska; the only one is at Thule Air Base in Greenland. And the six Arctic military bases — all “contingency bases,” meant to be staging grounds for expeditions into the Arctic — are consistently needing repair and intervention because of the effects of climate change.

In the past year, NATO has shifted emphasis to the Arctic. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in August at a meeting in Canada that NATO needed to strengthen its Arctic approach, for the region had become an Achilles heel. Afterwards, Finland, currently seeking membership to NATO, released a new Arctic strategy. The Arctic was prominently addressed at the Finnish Security summit in Helsinki and the annual Arctic Assembly in Reykjavik, where heads of states, diplomats, ministers and Arctic states meet annually to discuss challenges facing the region.

The U.S., too, took some steps forward. There were the two new roles focused on the Arctic at State and Defense. This year also, through North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. assisted Canada in updating its largest air base to replace Cold World-era early-alert detection systems for nuclear missiles. And the U.S. State Department also released an Arctic report: The National Strategy for the Arctic Region. Congress had already approved funding for a deep-water port at Nome, Alaska, while the U.S. Navy has flirted with reopening its own former base in Adak, Alaska, and attempted to open a deep-water port in Barrow, Alaska. But no concrete plans have been announced.

The reaction to the report from some Arctic analysts I spoke to was underwhelming, though. The new strategy, which prioritizes security, lists Russia and China as primary threats and emphasizes the importance of cooperation with Arctic countries such as Finland and Sweden. At the same time, several critics told me, the report was vague and lacked a commitment to real action. The first subpoint under the security pillar was to “improve our understanding of the Arctic operating environment,” placing the U.S. far behind its stated competition, who are already building more icebreakers and military bases and planning out ice routes. The report said nothing about ice breakers or the importance of broadening U.S. reach within the greater Arctic region. And while it did broadly address climate change and increased regional competition, it didn’t say anything about how those issues would be addressed. Futhermore, the report said an American presence in the Arctic region will only be “as required,” a designation that many Arctic experts think is shortsighted.

Heather Conley, the president of the German Marshall Fund, told me the nation’s new policy remained amnesiac and reminiscent of years past. She said it did not reflect the changing geopolitical and commercial importance of the region. “I see policy that in its isolation is fine,” Conley said. “It’s just fragmented and doesn’t necessarily have an overarching policy objective that everyone understands. … And they’re not reflecting these really important geostrategic, whether they’re economic, security shifts, and how are we adjusting policy.” Conley still thinks the U.S. sees the Arctic more of a domestic issue — an arena to focus on natural resource extraction in Alaska and policy toward indigenous populations — than an international one.

“As an Arctic nation, the United States remains deeply committed to the region,” a State Department spokesperson wrote me by email. “As noted in the recently released National Strategy for the Arctic Region, the United States is advancing efforts to mitigate and build resilience to climate change and ecosystem degradation. The State Department looks forward to advancing this vision through a whole-of-government, evidence-based approach, including with science agencies and in close partnership with the State of Alaska and Alaska Native Tribes.”

The situation on Thule Air Base is a good example of the problems the U.S. is facing. The center of any visible U.S. Arctic strategy would be Thule, located in Eastern Greenland and America’s northernmost military installation. To the west of Svalbard, 947 miles south of the North Pole, Thule (pronounced too-lee) is home to reindeer and Arctic temperatures so cold that Fahrenheit and Celsius often meet as equals (at -40 degrees). The base, whose tenants are contingents from the U.S. Space Force and visitors researching Arctic region conditions, serves as a major space surveillance and satellite command logistics hub and plays a key defense role in providing early warnings against nuclear attack.

For now, the base, used for passive monitoring, is virtually defenseless and relies on partner nations for ice breaking. “It is an issue,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, told me when I asked about the U.S. ice-breaking capability. Cancian said that capability “is limited and deteriorating.”

If the U.S. wants to project power abroad and compete with Russia and China, one way would be to make Thule, based on NATO soil, a linchpin in a strategy that seeks to establish air and sea superiority along the NATO bases nearest a new sea route which climate scientists, military planners and regional governors say will be fully opened to transit in the next few decades, as sea ice melts and more icebreakers are introduced to the region. Thule, once a Cold War hub, could again host strategic bomber operations and fighter pilot squadrons, as well as static anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic defenses. It could also serve as a launch point for more surface ship missions above the Arctic Circle, which the U.S. has rarely done since the end of the Cold War. None of this was mentioned in the Arctic plan explicitly.

Cancian, though, also sees this moment as one for collaboration. America’s Arctic issues, Cancian told me, are not a hindrance, but rather an opportunity for the U.S. to spread some of the burden-sharing to allied countries. “I think that the forces and resources are limited. We’re not going to be able to rebuild the kinds of capabilities we had during the Cold War,” Cancian told me. “It’s hard for the Europeans really to replace the U.S. The best they can do is complement us. But here’s one place where they are arguably ahead” and a place where the U.S. could follow rather than lead.

“NATO capabilities are reasonably strong for surveillance both undersea and in the air,” James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told me recently, “but not strong in terms of ice-breaking, which is of course crucial, or response to ground force movements.”

There’s also the problem of understanding how to operate in cold weather. Only in 2018 did Rear Admiral Andersen, the commander of the Norwegian Navy and Coast Guard, welcome American personnel to the High North and watch them “try to operate in cold weather after decades of operations elsewhere in warmer climates,” he told me. Andersen said his forces are working to bring American troops up to speed. The U.S. Marines has recently discussed shuttering its cold-weather mountain warfare training facility in California because it wasn’t adequately training troops in cold-weather operations. Instead, the U.S. would mostly rely on small-deployment training missions in NATO states with cold-weather experience.

And then there’s the problem of climate change, which leaves Thule incredibly vulnerable. The base was built on the western fringe of Greenland’s Arctic expanse in the 1950s for use as a first alert against nuclear attacks. “We were laying flat slabs of concrete on top of permafrost without really understanding the scientific implications or the engineering implications and challenges that that might present,” Col. Brian Capps, the current base commander, told me by satellite phone from Greenland. In March, the inspector general of the Department of Defense released a grim picture of the six bases in Alaska and Greenland, which suffered damaged runways and building foundations. A cracked runway due to constant thawing and refreezing of permafrost coupled with the water pooling on the runway after a thaw was a primary focus of the inspector general’s report. Those conditions remain today. “We have had a lot of decades to learn and adjust and do a lot of infrastructure rebuilds and infrastructure tweaks,” Capps said. Meanwhile the barracks which house Space Force servicemembers and researchers has sparse or non-existent wireless access. When asked about improvements to the runways and to living conditions, Capps said, “We have started.”

Experts I spoke with say a shift to the Arctic must mean a fundamental shift in strategy and execution. For years, the U.S. has relied on quick-response expeditionary forces to fight the Global War on Terror; less emphasis has been placed on homeland defense. Robust Arctic infrastructure will mean exactly that, accompanied by capacity building at once-abandoned facilities, addressing issues of military superiority and climate change at once. “I think U.S. policy preference has been to exclusively focus on one, try not to concentrate on the other, and the fact is you have to do both,” said Conley, the German Marshall Fund president.

This is something other countries are doing. Denmark, for example, allocated $245 million toward improving drone surveillance in the Arctic and modernizing air surveillance radar in the Faroe Islands while emphasizing domestic production of renewable energies over gas and oil production.

Meanwhile, other non-Arctic nations are vying for a foothold in the Arctic. Turkey has sought to ascended to the Svalbard Treaty, which grants Norway sovereignty over the archipelago but allows for equal access to signatories. Saudi Arabia is investing in Russian liquid natural gas projects. China and Moscow have also inked deals to build satellite relays in the Arctic to compete with U.S.-owned GPS systems.

“Beijing is talking about opening up more globalized international governance and moving away from the Arctic 5 and the Arctic 8 dominating the region,” said Trym Eiterjord, a research associate at the Arctic Institute with a focus on China and Asia in the Arctic. “Whether it comes to liquid natural gas ventures or ship building, the main variable when it comes to China as a threat in the Arctic is its cooperation with Russia in general.”

So far, though, Eiterjord said Russia has remained leery about opening up the Arctic to Chinese investment and opportunity, hoping to limit further competition.

Many of the 2,300 residents in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, don’t think regularly about conflict, no matter what goes on in the waters around them — and even though some of the towns new residents are Russians who fled the country during Putin’s war. A reluctance to openly discuss geopolitics is one way Norway manages its relationship with Russia. That hasn’t stopped provocations, like when a vessel from Barentsburg flew a Soviet Union naval flag through Norwegian waters in July.

At a coffeehouse in the center of town below where the avalanche claimed the lives of the two residents in 2015, I sat with Julia Lytvynova, a 32-year-old Ukrainian seamstress who used to live in Barentsburg where she worked at the craft shop making merchandise for tourists. She wrung her hands, revealing a tattooed silhouette of Ukraine streaked in swatches of yellow and blue. The tattoo memorialized her friend who died in July while defending the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. She said more Russian funding here might be a good thing. “That is less money they have to spend on bombs to kill my people,” Lytvynova told me.

Outside, the Norwegian Coast Guard’s NoCGV Harstad moored at the port. Not a week after Yakunin, the Russian drone pilot, was arrested, Norwegian police apprehended another Russian in Tromsø who, authorities said, was a Russian foreign agent. The spy was a researcher in a group working with the Norwegian government on hybrid threats linked to the Arctic.

“A lot of people can’t understand,” Lytvynova said, “if we can’t stop them, this war will start to move.”

POLITICO

Politico · by Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs

17. Cyber Warfare Is Getting Real

IDEAS17.12.2022 12:00 PM

Cyber Warfare Is Getting Real

The risk of escalation from cyberattacks has never been greater—or the pursuit of peace more complicated.

Wired · by Chris Blattman · December 17, 2022

In 2022, an American dressed in his pajamas took down North Korea’s internet from his living room. Fortunately, there was no reprisal against the United States. But Kim Jong Un and his generals must have weighed retaliation and asked themselves whether the so-called independent hacker was a front for a planned and official American attack.

In 2023, the world might not get so lucky. There will almost certainly be a major cyberattack. It could shut down Taiwan’s airports and trains, paralyze British military computers, or swing a US election. This is terrifying, because each time this happens, there is a small risk that the aggrieved side will respond aggressively, maybe at the wrong party, and (worst of all) even if it carries the risk of nuclear escalation.

This is because cyber weapons are different from conventional ones. They are cheaper to design and wield. That means great powers, middle powers, and pariah states can all develop and use them.

More important, missiles come with a return address, but virtual attacks do not. Suppose in 2023, in the coldest weeks of winter, a virus shuts down American or European oil pipelines. It has all the markings of a Russian attack, but intelligence experts warn it could be a Chinese assault in disguise. Others see hints of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. No one knows for sure. Presidents Biden and Macron have to decide whether to retaliate at all, and if so, against whom—Russia? China? Iran? It's a gamble, and they could get unlucky.

Neither country wants to start a conventional war with one another, let alone a nuclear one. Conflict is so ruinous that most enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace. During the Cold War, the prospect of mutual destruction was a huge deterrent to any great power war. There were almost no circumstances in which it made sense to initiate an attack. But cyber warfare changes that conventional strategic calculus. The attribution problem introduces an immense amount of uncertainty, complicating the decision our leaders have to make.

For example, if the US is attacked by an uncertain foe, you might think “well, better they don’t retaliate at all.” But this is a losing strategy. If President Biden developed that reputation, it would invite even more clandestine and hard-to-attribute attacks.

Researchers have worked on this problem using game theory, the science of strategy. If you’ve ever played a game of poker, the logic is intuitive: It doesn’t make sense to bluff and call none of the time, and it doesn’t make sense to bluff and call all of the time. Either strategy would be both predictable and unimaginably costly. The right move, rather, is to call and bluff some of the time, and to do so unpredictably.

With cyber, uncertainty over who is attacking pushes adversaries in a similar direction. The US shouldn’t retaliate none of the time (that would make it look weak), and it shouldn’t respond all of the time (that would retaliate against too many innocents). Its best move is to retaliate some of the time, somewhat capriciously—even though it risks retaliating against the wrong foe.

The same logic guides potential attackers. Knowing the US won’t retaliate all of the time and might even punish the wrong country creates an incentive to take electronic risks—ones they would never take with a missile.

Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist, and author of Why We Fight.

Wired · by Condé Nast · December 17, 2022

18. “A Spy Among Friends” dramatises the treachery of Kim Philby

I hope this makes it to the major streaming services we can access in the US.

“A Spy Among Friends” dramatises the treachery of Kim Philby

The thrilling series stars Guy Pearce as Britain’s most notorious double-agent

The Economist

“IF I HAD to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends,” E.M. Forster wrote in 1938, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” The English author’s words are used as an epigraph to “A Spy Among Friends”, Ben Macintyre’s bestselling book of 2014 about Harold “Kim” Philby, as well as for a new television adaptation. Yet the British intelligence officer and double-agent made no such choice: he betrayed his country, his friends and his family for decades and without remorse.

Philby’s name is synonymous with treachery on a colossal scale. Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Donald Maclean—the other members of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring—committed many duplicitous deeds for their Soviet masters, but none can claim the title of Britain’s most notorious spy. Philby played his high-stakes game of double-cross so ruthlessly, so successfully and for so long that he acquired a different level of infamy after he was unmasked.

During the second world war, Philby worked in Section V of the Secret Intelligence Service, where he analysed intercepted German wireless messages alongside Graham Greene (who was already a celebrated novelist). Rising through the ranks, Philby was posted to Istanbul in 1947 and two years later secured the plum post of MI6 chief in Washington. For the best part of his career, he could do no wrong. Some of his colleagues believed he would come to lead the service. He was admired, respected and, above all, trusted.

The whole time Philby was working for his country, he was also jeopardising it. He was recruited by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and remained fully committed to the communist cause for the rest of his life. The extent of his betrayal only became apparent after his defection in 1963. It is estimated that he passed on tens of thousands of classified documents to his Soviet controllers, information which resulted in sabotaged operations, nationwide scandal and the loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

Much has been written about the Cambridge Five in general and Philby in particular. Yet in “A Spy Among Friends” Mr Macintyre found fertile new ground to explore by focusing on the relationship between Philby and Nicholas Elliott, a longtime friend and fellow spy. For years, John le Carré contemplated writing a play about the pair; instead, he suggested that Mr Macintyre, who had published several books about double-agents and criminals, offer an account. The book draws on MI5 files and hitherto unseen papers and shines a valuable light on what Mr Macintyre considers “one of the most important conversations in the history of the cold war”—an exchange in Beirut during which Elliott obtained a confession from his old friend and arch-deceiver.

A six-episode series based on Mr Macintyre’s book has now been released on Britain’s new streaming service, ITVX. Starring Guy Pearce as Philby and Damian Lewis as Elliott, “A Spy Among Friends” has all the thrills, intrigue and skulduggery of its source material. The show reveals key moments in their friendship and turning-points in their careers, culminating in the two spies’ four-day showdown in Beirut. (By that point Philby was working as a journalist in the Middle East—for The Economist, among others.)

Naturally Alex Cary, the screenwriter, has employed artistic licence and made changes to the record that thicken his plot and heighten the drama. One is the invention of Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin), an MI5 operative tasked with investigating Elliott, around whom suspicion swirls. As she tells him: “What happened in Beirut is that the most dangerous Soviet penetration agent this country has ever known legged it. On your watch.”

Lily is a working-class woman, and thus an outsider looking in on a world dominated by affluent, well-connected men. For a while, Philby’s privilege kept the mole-hunters at bay. In his memoir, “My Silent War”, he explained that he was protected by the “genuine mental block which stubbornly resisted the belief that respected members of the Establishment could do such things.”

The privilege afforded to the upper classes is an enduring, and particularly British, theme. But Philby’s treachery continues to appal and enthral because it taps into a universal anxiety, Mr Macintyre argues: “The fear that someone may appear utterly loyal and loving on the outside, and yet [be] quite different on the inside.” Even as espionage has been transformed in the 21st century and become more dependent on technology, it still relies on individuals’ instinct for detecting or perpetrating duplicity. “Human intelligence is still about looking another person in the eye and trying to work out whether they are lying,” Mr Macintyre says. “That is the essence of the Philby story, as important in Ukraine today as it was in 1930s Britain.” ■

“A Spy Among Friends” is streaming on ITVX now

The Economist

19. Do Right by Our Afghan Allies. Pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.

OPINION

FARAH STOCKMAN

Do Right by Our Afghan Allies. Pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/opinion/afghan-adjustment-act-refugees.html?utm_source=pocket_reader

Dec. 16, 2022

5 MIN READ

Afghan refugees arriving at Dulles International Airport in August 2021.Credit...Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images

Give this article
157

By Farah Stockman

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board who reported from Afghanistan in 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2011.

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The fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August of 2021 left a consolation prize for the Afghans who stood by the United States for 20 years: They would be brought to safety in our country to begin life anew. That was the fragile promise they hung on to when the country they knew was lost.

For a while, it looked like a commitment that Americans would keep.

Video

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7:24

The Text Messages From Desperate Afghans Left Behind: ‘Show This to the People of America’

More than a year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a network of volunteers is still trying to evacuate Afghan allies. But this commitment has come at a great cost.

Last year, after what President Biden called America’s longest war culminated in one of the largest airlifts in U.S. history, some 80,000 Afghans were hastily evacuated to military bases in the United States. Thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government, Western nongovernmental organizations or the old Afghan government remain trapped inside Afghanistan.

Many who were evacuated, and some who were left behind, were eligible for Special Immigrant Visas that would eventually provide a path to citizenship under a category created in 2009 for Afghans who served in high-risk roles. The Biden administration also unveiled “Operation Allies Welcome,” an effort to give a home to loyal friends put at risk by our military withdrawal. It included a new program of “sponsorship circles” — inspired by Canada — that allowed ordinary Americans to support Afghan families in their resettlement.

But today, as Americans turn their attention to yet another war — this time, in Ukraine — our promises to Afghans are fading into red tape, bureaucracy and in some cases, open hostility. More than 70,000 Afghans in the United States remain in legal limbo, stuck in a temporary status called humanitarian parole that will expire in 2023. The Special Immigrant Visa program is hopelessly backlogged and is in danger of being allowed to lapse. The sponsorship circles for Afghans are also being phased out, after serving only about 600 individuals. (A new private sponsorship program for Ukrainians was rolled out in April, and a larger program that serves more nationalities is expected to be announced before the end of the year.) But resettlement efforts for Afghans have left much to be desired, as the suicide of an Afghan teenager whose family was placed on their own in rural Missouri makes clear.

Afghan evacuees “are all living with uncertainty here,” Asila Wardak, a former Afghan diplomat and a prominent human rights activist, told me recently. She was able to flee Afghanistan on a diplomatic passport and get a fellowship at Harvard. But she worries about her legal status when her fellowship ends. Most of all, she worries about the people she has left behind. “We don’t know what will be our future,” she told me. “Will we be sent back or stay here? We don’t know.”

When Americans don’t keep their promises to Afghan allies, it doesn’t just send a message to Afghans. It is noticed by would-be allies all over the world. That’s why Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — a state that welcomed tens of thousands of Hmong refugees after the Vietnam War — has been championing the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act. It would ease the path to permanent residency for Afghans who are already in the United States and establish an interagency task force to figure out how to help allies who remain trapped in Afghanistan.

“It would just show that our government is committed to standing with people who stood with us,” Senator Klobuchar told me. But unless this legislation makes it into the omnibus spending bill that is being hammered out in Congress, tens of thousands of Afghans who were airlifted to the United States will be forced to navigate a broken asylum system and a backlogged special visa system or face deportation to what is now called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. “That is just no way to treat people who stood with your military,” Ms. Klobuchar said.

Some Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are championing the Afghan Adjustment Act alongside Ms. Klobuchar. But others, including Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have refused to support it, citing concerns that the newly arrived Afghans could pose a security threat.

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The critics have a point. In the chaos of the evacuation, vetting was a challenge. Not everyone who got in should have. For instance, a person who was freed from prison in August of 2021 by the Taliban managed to get on an evacuation flight and has since been deported, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. The Defense Department’s inspector general will look into claims that some evacuees were on a Pentagon watch list. If true, that would be yet another stain on the American withdrawal.

Still, the Afghan Adjustment Act is one of the most promising ways to ensure that evacuees are rigorously vetted. The legislation requires additional screening for those who apply for permanent residency. Lawmakers who are concerned about security threats should support the Afghan Adjustment Act and use it to make sure people who are already living in this country are exactly who they claim to be.

A large majority of Afghans who aided the United States on their soil are innocent and deserving of help. The Afghan Adjustment Act’s most ardent supporters include American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have never forgotten America’s debt to the people who fought alongside them. It speaks volumes about the character of so many who wear the uniform that thousands of veterans have dedicated their lives to making sure that Americans keep their promises to their friends.

Chris Purdy, an Iraq War veteran who serves as director of Veterans for American Ideals, a coalition of veterans groups that is working with Human Rights First, told me that one veteran said he took out a second mortgage on a home to help sponsor Afghan families, while another persuaded his church to host Afghan evacuees and tutored them in English. Still others are driving across the country on a road trip aimed at lobbying lawmakers to support the Afghan Adjustment Act. Working together to do right by our allies has been their only solace in the dark days since the Taliban returned.

“The reality is that if it doesn’t pass, it’s going to be a huge problem for a lot of people,” Mr. Purdy told me. “It’s going to be a huge problem for the Afghans who are here and a huge psychological blow for the veterans who have been working on this for the last year and a half.”

Welcoming Afghans who fought alongside the U.S. military also serves a geopolitical purpose. A report in Foreign Policy magazine that U.S.-trained Afghan commandos are being recruited by Russia to fight against Ukraine offers one troubling scenario for the future of thousands of U.S.-trained soldiers and police.

Afghanistan may be last year’s war, a chapter that Americans would rather forget. But it would be a travesty if Congress, which funded that war for two decades, turned its back on our allies now.

First on CNN: Retired top military officials push for bill to help Afghans | CNN Politics

CNN · by Jake Tapper · December 17, 2022

CNN —

Roughly two dozen former leaders of the US military – including retired chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former Supreme Allied commander of NATO and several former commanders in Afghanistan – sent a letter to US congressional leaders Saturday evening urging them to act quickly to save Afghan allies who currently run the risk of deportation.

Specifically, the retired generals and admirals are asking congressional leaders to include the Afghan Adjustment Act in the omnibus spending bill, CNN is first to report.

The letter, organized by #AfghanEvac, argues that the legislation is not only “a moral imperative,” it furthers “the national security interests of the United States.”

If it fails to pass, the retired flag officers write, “the United States will be less secure. As military professionals, it was and remains our duty to prepare for future conflicts. We assure you that in any such conflict, potential allies will remember what happens now with our Afghan allies. If we claim to support the troops and want to enable their success in wartime, we must keep our commitments today.”

Signatories include names many Americans might know, such as former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Joseph Dunford, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen and Air Force General Richard Myers; former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Admiral Jim Stavridis; and the Special Ops Commander during the bin Laden raid, Admiral William H. McRaven.

Other signatories served as commanders in Afghanistan such as Army Gens. Stan McChrystal, David McKiernan, John “Mick” Nicholson Jr. and David Rodriguez.

“With the Afghan Adjustment Act, we would implement the strictest security vetting in our immigration system for Afghans, keeping our country secure,” the letter says, with the former flag officers pointing out that the legislation will maintain “our country’s binding commitments, too often sealed in blood, that were made to men and women who joined us, shohna-ba-shohna (shoulder-to-shoulder).”

Those pushing the legislation argue that time is running out for the tens of thousands of Afghans who are in the US and now run a risk of being deported if the Afghan Adjustment Act doesn’t become law. Many Republicans in Congress raised genuine concerns about vetting and other issues, but the legislation supporters argue those issues have been addressed.

CNN · by Jake Tapper · December 17, 2022

21. Flag Letter — #AfghanEvac

The full letter is at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/108o7wQBf3IuiHtW3tWWkzyy-IT8uIyuu/view

Flag Letter — #AfghanEvac

afghanevac.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 17, 2022

Former Joint Chiefs Chairmen, NATO Commander, SOCOM Commander, and other Flag Officers Support Afghan Adjustment Act

Admirals Mullen, McRaven, Stavridis; Generals Myers, Dunford, McChrystal, and more Urge Congressional Approval By Year’s End

Washington DC – Three former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO are among the high ranking military leaders who are now urging Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act in a letter organized by #AfghanEvac and sent to congressional leadership today. If the Afghan Adjustment Act does not pass, tens of thousands of our Afghan allies will be vulnerable to deportation back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in a few months.

“We are convinced that the Afghan Adjustment Act furthers the national security interests of the United States. It is also a moral imperative. Congress must act now and include the Afghan Adjustment Act and related provisions in the FY2023 Omnibus,” they write in the letter to Congressional leadership.

“With the Afghan Adjustment Act, we would implement the strictest security vetting in our immigration system for Afghans, keeping our country secure,” they added, pointing out that it will maintain “our country’s binding commitments, too often sealed in blood, that were made to men and women who joined us, shohna-ba-shohna (shoulder-to-shoulder).”

They go on to say that the act will honor military veterans and civilians who sacrificed greatly in Afghanistan. Many veterans and frontline civilians, as private citizens, have borne the burden of working to save U.S. allies who were left behind or left with an uncertain future. As a result, these veterans suffer continued trauma and moral injury.

“If Congress fails to enact the AAA, the United States will be less secure. As military professionals, it was and remains our duty to prepare for future conflicts. We assure you that in any such conflict, potential allies will remember what happens now with our Afghan allies,” they conclude in the letter. “If we claim to support the troops and want to enable their success in wartime, we must keep our commitments today. The AAA will go a long way.”

The full letter can be read at go.AfghanEvac.org/flag-letter.

“This latest show of support from senior military leaders underscores both the urgency and widespread popularity of the Afghan Adjustment Act. Multiple generations of veterans and frontline civilians are waiting for Congress to do the right thing,” said Shawn VanDiver, Navy veteran and President of #AfghanEvac. “Leaders like Senators Grassley and McConnell have said they stand with our troops, veterans, and military families. This is their time to prove it.”

The following are signatories on the letter urging they include the Afghan Adjustment Act in the FY23 Omnibus:

General Joseph F. Dunford, U.S Marine Corps (Ret)

Admiral Mike Mullen, U.S. Navy (Ret)

General Richard Myers, U.S. Air Force (Ret)

Admiral Jim Stavridis, U.S. Navy (Ret)

General Peter W. Chiarelli, U.S. Army (Ret)

General Stan McChrystal, US Army (Ret)

General David McKiernan, U.S. Army (Ret)

Admiral William H. McRaven, U.S. Navy (Ret)

General Austin S. Miller, U.S. Army (Ret)

General John W. Nicholson Jr,, U.S. Army (Ret)

General M. David Rodriguez, U.S. Army, (Ret)

General Raymond A. Thomas III, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General John A. Bradley, U.S. Air Force (Ret)

Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General Stephen Fogarty, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General Benjamin C. Freakley, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General John C. Thomson, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General John F. Mulholland Jr., U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General Mark C. Schwartz, U.S. Army (Ret)

Lieutenant General Francis Wiercinski, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General Edward Dorman III, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General Walter D. Givhan, U.S. Air Force (Ret)

Major General William Hix, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General Mark R. Quantock, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General Edward Reeder, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General Patrick J. Reinart, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General Jefforey Smith, U.S. Army (Ret)

Major General James “Boe” Young, U.S. Army (Ret)

Brigadier General Gary M Jones, U.S. Army (Ret)

The Afghan Adjustment Act has been recently updated to reflect comments from Republican members of Congress, including the requirement that the Department of Homeland Security conducts in-person interviews to ensure evacuees are sufficiently vetted; that a Customs and Border Protection agent interview cannot satisfy the in-person interview requirement; that congress has more oversight of the vetting process before it is finalized; and it now responds to every recommendation in recent inspector general reports, including that the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense brief congress on security concerns posed by evacuees.

The announcement comes as urgency grows around the Congressional bill, without which tens of thousands of Afghans will be left without a pathway to remaining in the U.S. after their humanitarian parole begins to expire in August 2023.

The letter signed by flag officers follows a similar letter organized by AfghanEvac earlier in the week featuring signatures from former Chiefs of Mission at Embassy Kabul in an unprecedented coming together of military and diplomatic leaders to support this bill.

Also last week, U.S. Senators Moran, Wicker, Leahy, and Shaheen became co-sponsors of the bill, which will enable newly arrived Afghans to undergo a robust vetting with all necessary security reviews and have a path forward to lawful permanent residency here in the United States. This brings the total number of cosponsors to 10.

The Afghan Adjustment Act, known in the House as H.R. 8685 and in the Senate as S. 4787, would mirror efforts made by the U.S. government for Vietnamese and South Asian refugees following the fall of Saigon.

As a result of the U.S.’s hurried evacuation from Afghanistan, the vast majority of Afghan evacuees were admitted to the country on a temporary basis under “humanitarian parole,” which does not confer a direct pathway to lawful permanent residence.

In order to provide such a pathway, as the U.S. has previously done for every generation of modern wartime evacuees, the Afghan Adjustment Act would allow eligible Afghan evacuees to apply for lawful permanent residence in the U.S. after one or two years of physical presence in the country.

The more than 200 organizations that make up the non-partisan #AfghanEvac coalition work hand-in-hand with government entities and advocate for ways to provide new Afghan community members with the stability they need to resettle and thrive in their new lives here.

For twenty years, Afghan allies worked and fought side-by-side with U.S. and allied forces through the longest war in American history. The #AfghanEvac coalition is committed to ensuring that their service, partnership, and commitment to American ideals is honored.

###

afghanevac.org

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

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Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

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FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 17

Dec 17, 2022 - Press ISW

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What Russia Got Wrong

Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

The National Defense Strategy shows the Pentagon’s increased focus on the gray zone. Here’s what that means.

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Russian disinformation rampant on far-right social media platforms

White paper protests end 'zero Covid' and rock China’s balance of power

Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War

Internal Rot

“Everyone was stealing and lying.”

Internal Rot

“Everyone was stealing and lying.”

The China-Russia ‘Alliance’: Double the Danger or Limited Partnership?​

Thursday, December 15, 2022 /

BY: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.; Niklas Swanström, Ph.D.​

Lessons of Ukraine

Xi is Putin’s ‘Silent Partner’

Different Strokes

The Trouble with Coordination

Russia Can Finally See That Putin’s ‘Days Are Numbered’

China’s Belt and Road comes untracked in SE Europe

No clear path to US-China reconciliation

The fentanyl wars: China, Mexico and the US

Pentagon's New UFO Office: No Aliens But Many Threat Concerns

The Multiple Streams Framework and Civil Affairs Operations

Biden official told members of Congress that Ukraine has ability to retake Crimea

Russian President Putin drives across Crimea bridge targeted by bomb

‘The red line’

Unclaimed attacks

Russia blaming Ukraine for deadly drone attacks

The New Battle for the Arctic

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Cyber Warfare Is Getting Real

The risk of escalation from cyberattacks has never been greater—or the pursuit of peace more complicated.

“A Spy Among Friends” dramatises the treachery of Kim Philby

The thrilling series stars Guy Pearce as Britain’s most notorious double-agent

Do Right by Our Afghan Allies. Pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.

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Flag Letter — #AfghanEvac

Former Joint Chiefs Chairmen, NATO Commander, SOCOM Commander, and other Flag Officers Support Afghan Adjustment Act

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BY: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.; Niklas Swanström, Ph.D.